Grace Ashiru
Smartprof, an edtech company in Morocco, has raised $110,000 in pre-seed funding from UM6P Ventures, Plug and Play, and other angel investors.
Hamza, Mustapha, and Ali Faiz started the edtech company in 2021. Its goal is to become a one-stop-shop edtech platform for private tutoring in North and West Africa, which the startup says is a billion-dollar market.
Smartprof will use the new fund to grow in Morocco and West Africa and to hire more developers to improve the quality of its products.
Due to more people wanting to get into public schools, there has been a lot of growth in private tutoring. Startups all over the region have been inspired by the rapid transition to digitising the personal tutoring experience and closing the achievement gap for families and students who depend on this type of education.
Mustapha Faiz said, “We started Smartprof because we saw that the private school system in Morocco was failing. We were sure that every student needed some help outside of school to deal with the problems they faced at school.
The market for private tutoring could be more cohesive, which makes it hard to find a tutor. Furthermore, there is no pricing transparency, thus there was a strong need for a digital product that delivers a better teaching experience.
The complicated and poor payment system in Morocco is one of the biggest problems for our business. But we still have a huge market opportunity, so we try to adapt to a very rigid banking system as much as possible.
Smartprof raised $50,000 in July and is backed by many institutions like l’École Centrale Casablanca and the UM6P startup campus, Stargate.
