With the impact of the pandemic on education due to school lockdowns, it is no surprise EdTech startups have filed the tech space. However, it’s also served to highlight the abysmal nature of earl years teaching: World Bank stated that globally, about 40 million teachers are leaving the educational sector. There are 1.5 billion primary aged-children and only a few of them have access to high-quality education and around 58 million primary-aged children are out of school, the majority are girls.
So to make a difference, online teaching serves as an opportunity in these very young years because the sizes of classes online can be reduced and the teaching quality enhanced. This is the idea behind the establishment of Bina, which bills itself as a “digital primary education ecosystem”. It has now raised $1.4 million in funding with the aim to emphasize the education of children between the ages of 4 and 12.
The funding round was led by Taizo Son, one of Japan’s billionaires. Other investors and advisors include Jutta Steiner, Founder at Parity Technologies, the company behind Polkadot decentralized protocol, and Lord Jim Knight, Ex-Minister of Education (UK).
Taizo Son, one of Japan’s billionaires led the funding round. Other investors and advisors include Lord Jim Knight, Ex-Minister of Education (UK), and Jutta Steiner, Founder at Parity Technologies, the company behind Polkadot decentralized protocol.
It also boasts of “adaptive learning paths” that cover international standards; teachers with a minimum of 8 years of digital teaching experience; and data-driven decision making for its pedagogical approach.
Bina’s CEO and founder Noam Gerstein said: “I’ve interviewed students, teachers, and parents globally for years, and it is clear they need a new systemic design. With our founding families, we are developing a world that allows every child have access to quality education, educators’ skills are acknowledged and enhanced with time and parents do not have to choose between their family life and work.”
He says it also grants Pupils Company shares (RSUs) as they grow with the school. Currently available to English-speaking students in the CET timezone, the Bina School is planning a SaaS product for governments, NGOs, and school systems.
“We right now compete against companies like Outschool, Pearson’s online Academy, primer, and Prisma,” he told me over a call. “So these are the big names of the last year for the first phase. But the strategy is that we’re building it in two phases. The first phase is actually building a school that we operate like a ‘lab’ school. And the second phase is what we call ‘Bina as a service’. So it’s a SaaS ‘school as a service’. The idea is that we offer collaboration with NGOs and governments, doing accreditation and training and licensing of the product. So for that second part, we’re actually competing against the big accreditation system.”
