$8.6M Series A, Reflecting on Our Journey at Noon Academy
Today we celebrate reaching a significant milestone at Noon Academy 🙏🏼. Our team has closed a $8.6M Series A financing, the largest to date in the MENA EdTech industry.
We are also celebrating the determination and persistence of our team that brought Noon Academy this far. For us, closing a Series A financing was not the hardest part. Being an Education Technology (EdTech) startup and also raising the fund in the Middle East proved to be much harder challenges 😅, but we did it!
And in case you are wondering why we are celebrating this milestone then here are the reasons:
1- Innovation in Education Technology Takes so Much Time
If there is one thing that I learned in Noon academy then it would be that innovation in EdTech is neither quick nor easy. Integrating technology into education is about fundamentally changing the way students learn.
in 2013, me and lifetime friend Mohammed Aldhalaan cofounded Noon academy as a simple test prep website. Only after six years down the line and hundreds of data-driven experiments later, Noon Academy has managed to transform into a full-fledged social learning platform that allows students to study with friends in groups, compete with one another, and request top tutors for live on-demand tutoring. The global EdTech market is predicted to reach $252 billion by 2020, but it appears that many of the current EdTech solutions are maybe solving the wrong problem. What we have learned from our 2M+ students is that the biggest issue in studying isn’t accessibility or comprehension, rather it’s boredom, and that’s where Noon Academy’s aspiration to become the social learning platform for 50 million students by 2023 comes from. We at Noon Academy have a unique focus to increase the students motivation to spend more study time on our platform, which we cracked successfully and resulted in a very high students engagement in Noon Academy.
In addition, Noon Academy is transforming into an open platform, where any teacher from around the world can start their own group and engage students at their own convenience, while receiving recognition and the opportunity to earn additional income if chosen to teach by the global community of students!
2- Raising a 8.6M Series A in the Middle East is Very Hard
After years of bootstrapping, we decided it was time to raise fund. We pitched to more than 45 investors and VCs, but we were rejected. To be honest, I am very grateful to those rejections for the learnings we had from them, and for our team for being patient 🙏🏻.
But today, we raised the largest Series A to date in the MENA EdTech industry from the best in the region 😉, including Careem’s cofounder (the region’s first unicorn), and co-led by top VCs in the region Raed Ventures and STV, with the participation of high profile angel investors including Mazen Aljubair (early investor and Careem board member), Abdulrahman Aljadhai (CEO of Elm), Dr. Mohammed Almeshekah, and other active investors.
In the past years, our growth has been deliberate, and aggressive. Each of our team member has been instrumental in reaching this milestone, and their obsessive customer focus has allowed us to serve more than 2,000,000 students so far.
3- Building an A+ Team is Tough
Back in 2013, we built our first team of 5 members in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Everything looked difficult, but the team was passionate enough to get through those tough days
As we grew, we continued to only attract the best talents -which btw proved not to be easy in Saudi Arabia alone-. So, we started looking for talents in other countries as well.
At the beginning, we struggled to attract the best talents in Egypt and India as we had no funding nor an established brand. After many failures and hard work, we currently have an amazing team of 90+ talented people in three countries!
Over the next few months we will be growing our team of engineers, and concentrating on improving our product and user experience. We’re a distributed company with a collaborative culture & we’re always striving to improve ourselves. Want to join the fun?
So what comes next?
We’re focusing on our customers, just like always.
We listen to our students and teachers, and we react accordingly to what makes sense for the long term. For example, we’ve seen a natural need of our students NOT to study alone. New students are bringing their school friends to study with them in Noon Academy. As such, we transformed into a full-fledged social learning platform that allows students to study with friends in groups, compete with one another, and request top tutors for live on-demand tutoring.
Likewise, we recently introduced a new product designed and built specifically for school teachers. If you’re a teacher anywhere in the world, you can start your own study group and engage with your students for your own convenience and start building your fan base in the platform, along with a possibility to earn an additional income if the global community of students picked you up to teach them!
We are expanding to new markets!
We have a clear roadmap, and we’re ambitious to serve the global students community.
We have started in the Saudi Market in 2013, but we haven’t stopped there. In February 2019, we lunched in Egypt 🇪🇬 (10x the size of the Saudi market) as our first international market. Our next markets will follow soon and will include similar markets in Asia and Africa. Stay Tuned!
Special Thanks
Last, but not least, I would like to thank our students and teachers. We wouldn’t be here without you!
A special thanks also to the current team who is continuously helping Noon Academy to make its impact globally.
We had a defining year in 2019, and we look forward to building a long-lasting global company to teach 50M students around the world in 2023!
Onward!
