Pakistan’s Maqsad raises $2.8 million seed to develop its edtech platform 

Maqsad, a Karachi-headquartered edtech startup has raised $2.8 million in a seed spherical, it introduced in the present day. The spherical was led by Speedinvest, one among Europe’s largest seed funds, and included participation from returning investor Indus Valley Capital, Stellar Capital, Alter World, Johann Jenson (SVP Product at GoStudent), and different strategic angels. The startup stated that the spherical was oversubscribed and took its complete capital raised to this point to $4.9 million. Maqsad had beforehand raised $2.1 million in a pre-seed spherical in late 2021.

Based in 2021 by Rooshan Aziz and Taha Ahmed, Maqsad desires to make training accessible for 100 million Pakistani college students by means of an end-to-end studying cell platform that gives instructing, testing, and question decision for grades 9 to 12. Within the final six months, Maqsad’s cell app has been downloaded over one million occasions, answered 4 million pupil queries, and has constantly ranked because the #1 training app in Pakistan on the Google Play Retailer, claimed the startup in a press release.

The edtech platform desires to disrupt the native training ecosystem by providing an distinctive studying expertise to college students at a fraction of the fee. The corporate has collected suggestions from over 20,000 college students and lecturers throughout Pakistan to make sure studying outcomes are being achieved. Maqsad’s query-solving know-how (“DoubtSolve”) and interactive testing resolve a key downside for college students who lack prepared entry to high quality instructors.

With just one trainer for each 44 college students, Pakistan has one of many highest student-teacher ratios on this planet, famous a press release by the Karachi-based startup. The edtech ecosystem might play a giant function in addressing totally different points confronted by the training sector of the nation – together with the excessive student-teacher ratio downside.

“We just lately enhanced our evaluation characteristic, which permits college students to confidently self-evaluate, and witnessed constant 150%+ month-on-month progress in questions tried,” famous firm’s co-founder Rooshan in a press release.

Maqsad straight competes with native startups like Edkasa, and Center Jap edtech platforms Midday and Abwaab, which have expanded into Pakistan, within the latest years. With the newest funding, Maqsad has turn out to be the best-funded native startup centered on the Pakistani startup. It plans to make use of these funds to increase the topic choices and to supercharge the know-how behind the platform. Moreover, Maqsad’s long-term imaginative and prescient is to embed itself throughout the training ecosystem, with the corporate already receiving curiosity from personal and public sector establishments for potential partnerships. Pakistan is an untapped marketplace for edtech, with a forecasted annual spend of $37 billion by 2032. 1 / 4 of this goes in direction of after-school tutorial help that’s typically costly and troublesome to entry.

Incoming investor Speedinvest is an skilled edtech investor, with Vienna-based GoStudent, an edtech unicorn, already in its portfolio. The funding in Maqsad displays its potential to the touch the lives of tens of millions of scholars and disrupt the training ecosystem. Philip Specht, Accomplice at Speedinvest, stated in a press release: “We’re extremely impressed by Rooshan and Taha as workforce builders and imagine Maqsad is on monitor to be one of the crucial profitable companies in Pakistan.”

Indus Valley Capital, a returning investor, doubled down on its funding, highlighting the imaginative and prescient that Rooshan and Taha had for training in Pakistan. Indus Valley Capital’s founder Aatif Awan defined, “Investing once more in Maqsad is a no brainer as we now have seen them deliver collectively among the best startup groups in Pakistan to construct a category-leading product that has helped over one million college students.”

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