Kenyan Edtech Startup Craydel Raises $1 Million To Upgrade Its Platform

Kenyan education startup Craydel has raised $1 million to upgrade its search and recommendation engine to help make better suggestions in its career match assessment.

Craydel uses artificial intelligence in its search engine to help students and professionals select courses from various universities and compare the costs of those courses.

The pre-seed round was led by pan-African venture capital fund Enza Capital. Others include AI investment fund BriteGaze, Future of Learning Fund and two US-based firms, Bisk Ventures and Tekton Ventures Kenya-based Chandaria Capital and Nigeria-based LoftyInc Afropreneurs joined as well.

Sardana, Craydel’s CEO, said the company aims to transform the way students discover, compare and apply to higher education in Africa by matching them with their right career paths.

“An estimated $30 billion is spent every year on higher education in Africa but the current student experience in accessing higher education is abysmal. There is no aggregation of choices, and decision-making is influenced by biases and misinformation,” he said.

Africa’s higher education sector faces many challenges that require the intervention of various stakeholders including ed-tech startups such as Craydel. Edtech start-ups, however, remain underfunded with only $20M in venture capital raised from 2019 to date.