Akadasia, a Singapore-based mission-driven edtech startup is proud to announce that they have raised USD$550,000 in their latest seed round of funding. This is supported by Singapore’s first edtech accelerator, EduSpaze, Hester Spiegel from the Spiegels Future Family Fund GMBH, Andrew Hwang (Ex-Director of Facebook), Kwok Yang Bin from 6th Horizon LLP (Ex-ZenDesk), SuperCharger Ventures, and a few other angel investors.
Akadasia’s digital ecosystem that empowers educators worldwide has three core features – skillEd, designEd and collabEd – which allow educators to access pedagogy-based professional development courses to upskill their teaching, use digital tools to design engaging lessons for their students or courses for fellow educators, as well as collaborate, network and learn from one another respectively.
Since their pilot programme in 2020, the Akadasia platform has been used by over 160,000 teachers across 36 countries. Apart from individual teachers, 90% of Akadasia’s business is generated from B2B and B2G partners, who include government departments such as The Department of Education in the Philippines, Ikatan Guru Indonesia, as well as educational institutions such as Ngee Ann Polytechnic.
“In Southeast Asia, where class sizes mount to 40-60 students per class, teachers have a great multiplier effect. Given the traditionally low tech-savviness of teachers, upskilling teachers in how to teach more effectively using tech and digital infrastructure is useful, especially in a way that is intuitive for them. Our conventional educational system is due to an urgent update. As teachers give Akadasia’s platform an NPS score of 99.6, I believe that Akadasia has succeeded in building something that finally works for them,” shares investor Hester Spiegel.
The fresh injection of capital will be used to fuel Akadasia’s growth into new markets such as Indonesia, Vietnam and India to help support the growing user base. Akadasia has recently started making in-roads into the Indonesian market where 13 educational institutions have been added as partners. Furthermore, new functionalities will be added to the latest version of the Akadasia platform. This includes a new service, CertifyED, that allows education institutions to digitise their certification system on the blockchain for their own learners. Additionally, Akadasia will launch a mobile version of the platform to be made available on Android.
The need for pedagogical training for educators
“Education institutions are facing a huge challenge is the lack of access to relevant training, coupled with expensive fees for educators to upskill themselves. It is necessary to give our educators the right resources to upskill and mitigate the education disparities and gaps faced so that they can perform better to deliver quality education and create a vital role in the education landscape,” shares Alex Ng, Managing Director of EduSpaze.
He points to a 2020 study conducted by UNESCO which revealed that globally, 81% and 78% of primary and secondary school teachers respectively had made the minimum qualifications with core skills in pedagogy, instructional leadership, inclusive education and classroom management.
“Akadasia has been experiencing strong growth since the launch of our platform. We have been onboarding about 8,000 new users every month and this is primarily due to great interest from educational institutions and government departments across Asia. This is a testament that we are helping solve an underlying systems-level problem for teachers and the educational ecosystem. We are committed to empowering educators and have added new features based on iterative feedback on the ground. For instance, the rise of academic fraud has been jeopardising the credibility of both the document holder and the issuing authority. Hence, we launched our new service, CertifyED, which leverages blockchain technology for authenticating the document verification process,” says Neelesh Bhatia, CEO and co-founder of Akadasia. “With this funding, we are extremely thrilled to accelerate our growth into new and critical markets to build a stronger community of educators who can utilise our platform for an all-rounded experience.”
