uLesson, an African edtech startup, has closed a $15 million Series B investment from Tencent, Nielsen Ventures, and existing investors Owl Ventures, TLcom Capital and Founder Collective. It is the largest disclosed investment in an African edtech startup and the funding comes 11 months after it raised a $7.5 million Series A.
Founded by Sim Shagaya in 2019 (who is also the brain behind Konga and DealDey), uLesson curates personalised, curriculum-relevant content via mobile and PC devices for students in the K-7 to K-12 segment across Africa.
Students can access the lessons via streaming and SD cards, where they can download and store the content, allowing them to study remotely, removing challenges around internet access limitations and costs.
According to the startup, students spend an average of 57 minutes on the app) which has led to parents investing in smartphones for their kids’ schooling either independently or via uLesson’s “device+plan” bundle, which is only available in Nigeria.
Parents also allow their kids to learn on their phones (roughly 50% of uLesson’s learners do that). The prices on uLesson range from a monthly fee of ₦7500 (about $18) to a two-year “device+plan” of ₦137,000 ($334).
So far, the uLesson app has 2 million downloads and over 12.3 million videos have been watched, with 25.6 million questions answered on the platform.
The platform is available in other markets, such as South Africa, Sierra Leone, the UK, Liberia, Gambia and the US, but Shagaya said uLesson has spread in these countries via word of mouth. Nigeria remains uLesson’s largest market by far, said Shagaya. The country is responsible for 85% of uLesson’s paying users.
Regarding similar metrics, uLesson said its paying users grew 600% this past year. Its monthly average users also increased 700%, while average daily users surged 430% within the same time frame.
The company said its live lesson demand grew by 222% since its introduction in September. Regarding learners’ performance, the Abuja-based startup claims that some learners have moved from the 50th percentile to the 90th percentile in their classes.
In August, uLesson introduced offline centers. While these spaces were destinations for learning, going forward, they will be places to educate the public on uLesson’s importance and sign them up, said Shagaya.
“We’re going to be rolling out a lot of these things next year because we’ve seen that this is [how] people use them,” Shagaya remarked, adding that “2021 for us was a year of testing what works and we know what works now. So there’s a lot of experimentation in 2021. And 2022, it will be executing on what works.”
