Kidato, a Kenyan YC-backed edutech startup announced that it has closed a $1.4 million seed fundraise to expand its online school for K12 education in Africa.
Investors in this seed round include Learn Start Capital, Launch Africa Ventures Fund, Graph Ventures and Century Oak Capital, among other angel investors.
Founded by serial entrepreneur Sam Gichuru, Kidato is an online school for K-12 students with a vision to provide a high-quality, affordable education to the growing middle class in Africa. Kidato currently has more than 700 registered students from eight countries around the world, including Canada, Kenya, Malawi, Switzerland, Tanzania, UK, United States, and UAE.
The company intends to use the funds to invest in business growth and product development.
According to Sam Gichuru, one of the reasons he set up Kidato was the exorbitant tuition fees for private schools in Kenya, which could be as high as $8000 per annum. He said to Techcrunch, “I have three kids. I moved them from private schools to homeschooling because that was the next option to give them the same quality of education but at an affordable price.” That was when I started noticing the other challenges private schools had.”
However the COVID-19 pandemic affected the homeschooling effort and he had to resort to building a platform around Zoom for these teachers to continue delivering lessons for his kids. This then grew with more parents wanting to join the platform.
Apart from providing standard international school education, Kidata also provides after-school programs like robotics and chess, art, coding, and debate classes.
The business also invests in ensuring its teachers make the classes fun and interactive by them on how to make classes interactive by using the context of arcade games like Minecraft and Roblox to tailor lessons taught to students in different subjects.
Sam Gichuru also ensure teachers are paid at least one and a half times more than the average teacher in a private school to retain them.
Kidato was one of the African startups accepted into Y Combinator’s ((YC) 2021 winter cohort. It raised $125,000 from YC. This is Sam’s second stint at Y Combinator as he took part in the same program in 2016 with KuHustle. He founded one of Kenya’s well-known incubator Nailab.
