Irish start-up Educatly has secured €1 million in pre-seed funding with contributions from both the Irish State and the Egyptian government.
The fundraise comes ahead of a plan by the Dublin-headquartered edtech company to raise a further €5 million next year.
Founded in late 2020 by Mohmmed El Sonbaty, Joan Manuel and Abdelrahman Aman, Educatly is a platform that allows students to search, compare and apply to more than 120,000 higher education opportunities globally. Since launch its user base has grown to over 100,000 users from 190 countries worldwide, with around half a million programmes viewed.
The pre-seed financing for the company was led by Falak Startups, a state-backed start-up accelerator based in Cairo, and by Enterprise Ireland. Other investors include Dublin-based Seod Ventures, which has also previously backed Irish tech companies Lintil and Snapfix.
Speaking to The Irish Times, Mr El Sonbaty, the start-up’s chief executive, said Educatly was seeking to do for education what LinkedIn had done for recruitment.
“We are building the most comprehensive educational network imaginable to showcase schools and colleges, enabling institutions to post information about the programmes, and students to showcase their educational achievements as well as to connect with like-minded people to share their knowledge,” he said.
“We are on a mission to digitally map and integrate the world education ecosystems or to make it simple, Educatly is building for education what LinkedIn has built for jobs,” Mr El Sonbaty added.
He said the company would use the funding to take on more staff, scale sales and marketing operations, and to boost further product development.
