Shikho, a Singapore-Bangladesh based education technology (ed-tech) start-up, has raised $100,000 in pre-seed funding as it gears up to launch its mobile learning app on the Google Play Store later this year.
The initial release will include content for the Secondary School Certificate (SSC) level General Mathematics and Bangla-medium syllabus but the team has already started to develop the academic curriculum for other highly sought-after SSC and HSC courses for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects.
The company believes that like the technological disruption seen in other segments of our economy, education and training will also undergo a fundamental tech-enabled revolution. They see ed-tech, as not only the digitization of traditional education, but the application of technology to deliver a new form of learning architecture for Bangladesh; one that has the power to harness the social reach of the internet and enable new levels of standardization and democratized access.
“Shikho is incredibly unique in its approach as the product is a combination of academic rigour and ingenuity, creative design, thoughtfulness and modern technical innovation. All the elements come together to create a really beautiful and effective learning product,,” said Dr Hanns Kendel, one of the directors of the company and a senior teaching fellow at SOAS University of London
The Shikho app will offer students the ability to learn at their own pace with content accessible from anywhere and anytime at a fraction of the cost of traditional classroom learning.
Students can learn by watching engaging and contextual animated video lessons, attend interactive live classes delivered by expert teachers and revise concepts using topic-specific summaries.
The team is obsessed with creating a holistic learning platform, a sort of one-stop-shop for learning, and have also enabled ready access to a large but carefully curated library of questions and solutions for both practice and testing within the app itself.
The clever technology behind the scenes then allows real-time analysis and visualization of each user’s performance and progress. Over time, the app also plans to provide personalized and adaptive learning programs by utilizing machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities.
“We are building on top of a very robust and modern technology stack. Our aim was to ensure we had a scalable and data-centric architecture,” said Fahim Shoumik, lead developer and solutions architect, and part of a young, ambitious and growing team at Shikho.
With a student population of almost 40m, Bangladesh like India, should be a key market for a nascent global ed-tech industry, as newly middle-class parents look for tools to help their children achieve their goals.
“There is a real lack of quality educational content that is available in Bangla on the internet today. I feel that the founding team at Shikho has the vision, experience and ability to really execute and move the dial for Bangladesh,” said Ahmed Arfin Amin, one of the two investors from this pre-seed funding round.
