Kenya’s Kidato Receives $125,000 from Y-Combinator

Flutterwave, Envyl, Instabug, Lynks, Paystack and Worldcover all have something in common: the accelerator, Y-Combinator. Y-Combinator has differentiated itself from other startup accelerator firms in Africa in the value-added service they have been able to provide their clients in addition to providing startup funds for African Startups.
Kidato became the latest African startup to receive funds from Y-Combinator after they received $125,000 Funding from Y-Combinator. They join Nigeria’s VendEase and Mono, Côte D’Ivoire’s Djamo and Cairo-based Flextock as the African startups to have so far been accepted for the winter 2021 batch.
Kidato was founded in 2020 by Sam Gichuru as an online school for K-12 students to provide high-quality, affordable education to the growing middle class in Africa, where parents must often choose between public schools with student-teacher ratios as high as 50:1 or private schools with expensive tuition fees.
Kidato has seen strong early reduction in number of users, with 30 students in the full school in its first two semesters, and it has enough bookings to triple that in the new school year in September. It has more than 400 registered students and 200 students from 8 countries enrolled in different classes, such as coding, chess, languages, art and music. The platform currently has over 32 tutors and has received over 500 applications in the last six months.
According to Gichuru, “Y Combinator has helped us shape our mission, introduced us to an amazing community of founders globally and encouraged us to build a product that our parents and students want and love.”
Their acceptance into the Y-Accelerator program will do so much to help more African, middle class students gain access to high quality education, and this will do the continent and the world a lot of good.