Taha Ahmed and Roshan Aziz left their jobs in strategy consulting and investment banking in London earlier this year to found a mobile-only education platform startup, Maqsad, in Pakistan, with a goal “to make education more accessible to 100 million Pakistani students.” Having grown up in Karachi, childhood friends Ahmed and Aziz are aware of the challenges of the Pakistani education system, which is notably worse for those not living in large urban areas (the nation’s student-teacher ratio is 44:1). Pakistani children are less likely to go to school for each kilometer of the distance between school and their home — with girls being four times affected, Maqsad co-founder Aziz said.
Maqsad announced today its $2.1 million pre-seed round to enhance its content platform growth and invest in R&D. The pre-seed round, which was completed in just three weeks via virtual meetings, was led by Indus Valley Capital, with participation from Alter Global, Fatima Gobi Ventures and several angel investors from Pakistan, the Middle East, and Europe. Maqsad will use the proceeds for developing in-house content, such as production studio, academics, and animators, as well as bolstering R&D and engineering, Aziz told TechCrunch. Aziz said the company would focus on K-12 education in Pakistan, including 11th and 12th-grade math, with plans to expand into other STEM subjects for the next one-two year.
Massad’s platform, which provides a one-stop-shop for after-school academic content in a mix of English and Urdu, will be supplemented by quizzes and other gamified features that will come together to offer personalized education to individuals. Aziz explained that its platform features include adaptive testing that alters a question’s difficulty level depending on users’ responses. The word “maqsad” means purpose in Urdu. “We believe everyone has a purpose. Massad’s mission is to enable Pakistani students to realize this purpose, whether you are a student from an urban center, such as Lahore, or a remote village in Sindh: Maqsad believes in equal opportunity for all,” Aziz said.
“We are building a mobile-first platform, given that 95% of broadband users in Pakistan are via mobile. Most other platforms are not mobile optimized,” Aziz added. “It’s about more than just getting students to pass their exams. We want to start a revolution in the way Pakistani students learn, moving beyond rote memorization to a place of real comprehension,” said co-founder Taha Ahmed, who was a former strategy consultant at LEK. Aziz said the company ran small pilots in April and May and started full-scale operations on 26 July, adding that Maqsad will launch its mobile app, currently under development, in the coming months in Q4 2021 and has a waitlist for early access.
The COVID-19 pandemic reshaped the education industry, heating the global edtech startups that made online education more accessible for a broader population. “Struggles of students during the early days of the pandemic motivated us to run a pilot. With good initial traction and user feedback, the size of the opportunity to digitize the education sector became very clear,” Aziz said. For example, Aziz mentioned countries like India and Indonesia. According to Aziz, the education market size in Pakistan is estimated at $12 billion and is projected to increase to $30 billion by 2030. It plans to build the company as a hybrid center offering online and offline courses like Byju’s and Aakash and expand classes for adults such as MasterClass, the U.S.-based online courses for adults, as its long-term plans, Aziz said.
“Maqsad founders’ deep understanding of the problem, unique approach to solving it, and passion for impact persuaded us quickly,” the founder and managing partner of Indus Valley Capital, Aatif Awan, said. “Pakistan’s edtech opportunity is one of the largest in the world, and we are excited to back Maqsad in delivering tech-powered education that levels access, quality, and across Pakistan’s youth and creates lasting social change,” Ali Mukhtar, general partner of Fatima Gobi Ventures said.
