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EdTech Startup Klas Gets $1 Million in Pre-Seed Funding

Klas

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  Nigerian EdTech startup Klas has raised $1 million in pre-seed funding to expand the reach of its online teaching platform well beyond its native country’s borders. The funding round, which is the second in the young startup’s existence, was led by Ingressive Capital. Also participating in the round were Techstars, HoaQ Capital, and several angel investors. Klas looks set to deploy the funds to onboarding and supporting tens of thousands of virtual schools, originating out of South Asia and North America, on its platform.
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Founded in 2022 by Nathan Nwachuku (CEO) and Lekan Adejumo (CTO), Klas serves as an integrated platform for the sale of courses, ebooks, and live classes. It brings together elements such as payments, scheduling, and community management, allowing its users to organize virtual schools, charge for their teaching services, and earn quite seamlessly from it all. Nwachuku explains that, unlike a lot of existing EdTechs, Klas provides an extensive set of tools that lets users set up online schools from scratch. In this sense, it functions like a “Shopify for education”, in that it supplies the infrastructure for digital schools to operate on. Before launching officially, Nwachuku and Adejumo had raised $180,000 from angel investors, such as Odunayo Eweniyi, CEO of PiggyVest, and Tola Adesanmi of PropTech startup Spleet. Following this achievement, it was accepted into the Techstars Accelerator in 2022. Speaking on the investment in Klas, Managing Director of Techstars Toronto, Sunil Sharma, said that Techstars was supporting the startup because they were confident in the “core abilities of its founders”. “This confidence was further demonstrated by our follow-on investment in the company, something we like to do when presented with exceptional opportunities,” Sharma noted.
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According to Nwachuku, Klas currently has more than 5,000 schools and creators on its platform, and over 300,000 students learning from them. These users are spread over 30 countries and counting, with a majority of them residing in Nigeria. India, which contributes the second-highest number of users of any country on the platform, is a target for Nwachuku and his team. They also intend to strengthen their presence in North America, where there is a large market for the sort of services they provide. Nwachuku says that creators on the Klas platform have thus far earned “hundreds of thousands of dollars.” The startup is now aiming to onboard a lot more of them; it wants to grow its number to 100,000 by 2027.
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Klas charges a 5% fee on transactions carried out on its free plan. It intends to introduce an enterprise plan, which will draw a monthly fee of $199 from businesses looking to train their staff on it.
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