FoondaMate — 2023 Q1 Roundup
Q1 has come to an end, and it’s been an exciting one for us at FoondaMate!
We’ve doubled down on our mission to enable students from all backgrounds to easily access quality study material and educational knowledge, ultimately helping them achieve better education outcomes.
Two and a half years ago, after WhatsApp launched their API, with WhatsApp being the most used internet product in Africa [1][2][3] — and therefore chat being the default interface of the internet, we saw an opportunity to use chat and AI to enable access to quality study material and educational guidance at scale. This led us to develop a WhatsApp-based AI tutor that provides students guidance and study material based on their curriculum.
From the outset, we’ve firmly held the belief that chat is the interface of the future, and that AI in the form of NLP will be the means by which information is accessed. Our conviction grew even stronger after seeing the amazing response to our product launch. Within just a few weeks, over 40k users signed up, and we were inspired by how quickly they placed their trust in our robot tutor. In a matter of minutes, users went from asking purely educational questions to seeking guidance on personal development matters and even calling FoondaMate their friend.
To meet the growing demands of our users, we turned to the best open source NLP tools available at the time. Among these tools was Google’s open source Language Model, BERT, which provided a solid foundation and served as a significant source of inspiration for us. Drawing on this foundation, we were able to build specialised models that cater to students in multiple countries and education systems.
Our approach to building has always been model-agnostic, prioritising the development of proprietary models first and foremost. By taking this approach, we’ve been able to achieve hyper-personalisation for our use-cases and users.
The excitement we saw from our users early on in our journey made the recent advancements in NLP and generative AI, epitomised by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, seem inevitable to us. We anticipated the success of such technological breakthroughs due to the high level of interest and engagement in our product, and ChatGPT’s rise to global prominence has only confirmed our belief in the potential of this technology.
Our existing groundwork for uplifting students was solidly established prior to the emergence of LLMs. Nevertheless, drawing from LLM-related research, we have been able to accelerate our progress and facilitate dynamic learning experiences that are based on core education curricula. The engagement we saw in Q1 serves as evidence of the potential of the approach we’ve committed to.
We started Q1 at just over 1M users, finished the quarter at 1.8M.
In March alone we saw 250k+ signups — in March last year we were at just over 250k users in total.
This growth has come with some exciting numbers under the hood:
✅ Our users asked FoondaMate 18M questions in Q1! For some perspective, in the whole of 2022 our users asked 19M questions.
✅ And they downloaded over 1.5M practice question papers and answer sheets.
✅ On average they sent us 500k messages per day, every day of this quarter.
And we did all this with just 10 FTEs, including founders. While we plan on staying lean to maintain agility, we’re excited about attracting like minded team members who can help us move even faster. Individuals who are excited about how LLMs can radically transform education.
We’ve only ever focused on South Africa, Indonesia, Zimbabwe and Nigeria; however, FoondaMate has already been used in over 150 countries, spanning from Kenya to India, and from the UK to the US.
Having tailored FoondaMate to cater to the requirements of users in distinct educational curricula across South Africa, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, and Indonesia, we now know how to move quickly in tailoring FoondaMate to fully support students in a new country. The most recent market we launched in was Zimbabwe, where we hit 80k users in the first month. In Indonesia, the first market we launched in after South Africa, it took six months to achieve this milestone.
Our users tell us the magic in FoondaMate is that it’s like having your highest performing classmate as your best friend. And on speed dial 24/7. It knows what you’re learning at school and what resources you need to study with accuracy and speaks to you like your friend does.
Now, more than ever, we are excited to be moving the needle at the intersection of education and AI. Our core strength remains organising information students care about; that, if organised, made malleable, and accessible at scale, has the potential to transform lives.
Our ambition for the coming years is to build the best personal tutoring AI in the world, one that will be able to take learners from middle-school all the way to their first job… and everything in between.
This will require teaching our AI a range of skills, from studying for middle school tests and excelling in high school exams, to navigating the university application process, applying for jobs, and preparing for interviews.
Our opportunity lies in providing students with guidance and advice that is grounded in their day-to-day reality at scale. Having already seen this potential in a fraction of the markets we plan to expand to, we are excited about the future.
Notes
[1] https://theculturetrip.com/africa/articles/why-most-of-africas-data-is-used-on-whatsapp/
[2] https://www.messengerpeople.com/whatsapp-in-africa/
[3] https://techcabal.com/2022/07/06/the-top-smartphone-apps-in-africa/
