South African EdTech Startup Secures $2M Funding

South African edtech startup, FoondaMate, has secured $2 million in seed funding in a round led by LocalGlobe, a U.K-based venture capital firm. The money is expected to help expand its reach by improving the WhatsApp and Facebook-based learning chat bots.

FoondaMate has been helping high school students in emerging markets to access revision material through WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. The startup uses chat bots to give students immediate answers to questions while allowing them access to revision papers.

According to co-founder Dacod Magagula, the choice of WhatsApp was informed by its wide reach, and affordability. He further said that he started experiment with WhatsApp when the beta API was introduced in 2020, and has been improving on the system over time.

“I thought it’d be a really good way to enable access to study materials to students in the same position as myself… because a majority of students do not have access to the wider internet nut have access to WhatsApp,” said Magagula, a graduate of computer science from the University of Cape Town, “also, a lot of network providers offer WhatsApp for free to attract users to their network.”

The platform has been used by more than 400,000 students using more than 10 languages in over 30 countries, among them Colombia, Mexico, Brazil and Indonesia.

The co-founder who is also the company’s CEO and CTO said that the next phase of FoondaMate is localizing content to make it useful to more learners in more countries.

Part of the team’s work at FoondaMate is to vet the source of information and monitor results to ensure that children using the platform are safe.

The funding round was led by LocalGlobe, the U.K.-based venture capital firm. Other investors include, FirstCheckAfrica, Future Africa, and LoftyInc among others.

LocalGlobe partner, Ziv Reichert has lauded FoondaMate saying that the startup has evolved into a tool that is now used and loved by learners from a range of backgrounds, with varying needs and learning styles, from all over the world.

“We believe that it takes immense empathy for a problem and a real long-term view to build a product of this kind,” Reichert noted.