Orcas, a Cairo-based online marketplace for babysitters and tutors has raised $500,000 in Pre-Series A funding round led by Egypt’s largest Venture Capital fund Algebra Ventures.
The investment was joined by cross-border edtech fund NFX Ventures. This new investment follows the $150,000 Orcas raised from Khaled Ismail, Kamelizer, and Cairo Angels.
The startup was founded in 2013 by Hossam Taher, Amira El Gharib, Omar Fayez, and Ahmed Ismail by distributing a booklet to their target customers and later setting up a Facebook page to help them reach more customers.
The startup eventually launched its mobile apps in 2017 to connect parents with screened, trained and experienced babysitters, tutors, and language instructors.
At the time of launch, Orcas had over 1,000 babysitters and tutors and 2,000 recurring customers.
Today, Orcas which was previously known as Cairositters is now used by over 20,000 parents in Cairo, Alexandria, El Gouna, and the North Coast. The app features ratings and reviews of all the tutors and babysitters on their profiles in addition to their education and work history.
Amira El Gharib, Orcas’ co-founder and Chief Growth Officer commenting on the investment, said, “Our students, parents, and partners are our primary focus. We will use this investment to develop our product offering and scale our operational capacity with the end goal of optimizing user experience for all our stakeholders.”
Amira also said that Orcas is launching a new feature (category) this summer called Discoveries that will allow children to learn a variety of different activities, “Designed with school summer vacations in mind, Orcas Discoveries are events that allow children to expand their horizons and explore a range of exciting activities. Offering everything from cooking and coding workshops to art, culture, and music trips in a variety of languages – they’re designed to safely engage children while developing their skills and enriching their experiences.”
A spokesperson for Algebra Ventures, speaking about the investment, said, “Orcas complements strained traditional educational institutions by connecting students with specialized tutors who enable individualized learning,‘ says an Algebra spokesperson. ‘The one-size-fits-all model is leaving many young people behind, and the market is ripe for technological disruption.’
Ahmed Elkalla, a Managing Partner at NFX Capital, added, “Orcas and other tech-enabled tutoring platforms are delivering today on what academic research promised more than 20 years ago. Students who are tutored one-to-one perform significantly better than students who learn via conventional instructional methods. This used to be a luxury very few people could afford but now through tech-enabled platforms like Orcas a much wider group of students can reap the personalized tutoring benefits.”
