African Startup uLesson Raises $15m, with Support from Tencent and Nielsen Ventures

Two-year old edtech startup uLesson, founded by a Nigerian, announced that it has now closed a $15 million Series B round.

Edtech startup companies benefited greatly from the pandemic’s disruption, pulling huge amounts of money from investors worldwide and it felt like African startups were left out. However, the announcement of uLesson shows that this is not the case any longer.

The investment comes almost a year after uLesson closed a $7.5 million in Series A round. and was completed by five different investors, and they are; Tencent, TLcom Capital, Founder Collective, Nielsen Ventures and already existing investors Owl Ventures. The investment is also the largest announced investment in an African edtech startup.

uLesson was founded by Nigerian Sim Shagaya in 2019, and it came into the market when the pandemic ravaged the world last year. Being a young company, uLesson had to keep switching business models in a bid to determine what would be best for a very tough African market.

At its launch, uLesson started by providing a product pack of SD cards and dongles which had pre-recorded videos for K-12 students. They can access lessons either via streaming or through using SD cards to download and save the lesson content.

However, uLesson has introduced some new features for a comprehensive edtech play for the demographic. It added quizzes, as well as a homework help feature that would assist students in connecting to tutors from other universities.

It also started a live class feature, which consists of polls and leaderboards as well as a live experience of DevKids, a coding class that is separate from the core uLesson platform. DevKids has however been rolled back, with Shagaya stating that plans were being made to introduce the feature – which was initially an experiment in teaching kids how to code and at a point raked in about 30% of the company’s total revenue – sometime in January next year.