Bangladeshi Edtech Startup Shikho Aims To Scale Exponentially With $1.3 Million Seed Funding-Markedium

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Bangladeshi Edtech Startup Shikho Aims To Scale Exponentially With $1.3 Million Seed Funding2 min read

By Sadik Ahmed Last updated Jul 29, 2021

Shikho, the Bangladesh-based ed-tech startup has announced a $1.3 million seed round investment co-led by LearnStart and Anchorless Bangladesh. Singapore-based Wavemaker partners and Ankur Nagpal, the founder and CEO of the online course platform Teachable were also amongst the investors for the seed round.

Shikho was founded in April 2019 by its CEO Shahir Chowdhury and COO Zeeshan Zakaria however it officially launched in October 2020 in the Google Play store. The start-up had initially applied for funding in January 2020 in order to scale operations. In June 2020, they received their first pre-seed round funding of $100,000 from LearnStart, the seed fund of Silicon Valley based ed-tech investment firm Learn Capital.

Shikho mainly focuses on academic material based on the Bangladeshi National Curriculum of grades 9, 10, 11, and 12 with future plans to introduce content for grade 6 up to the university level.

To keep students motivated and engaged, the app uses various gamification features that allow students to earn points and badges as they progress through the syllabus. The points rank them in a leaderboard, where students can see how they have performed compared to other users from their school or the entire app.

Shikho plans to use the new investment to scale up operations and develop an app for parents. The company also plans to launch more free content to increase its user conversions into paying customers. Paying users of Shikho have high engagement rates spending about 45 to 50 minutes in the app daily, says the company’s CEO Shahir Chowdhury.

With the new seed investment of $1.3 million, their total funding amounts to $1.6 million. According to their website, Sikho has partnered up with Grameenphone, Bkash, and Learn Capital. Zubair Siddiky and Ambareen Reza, the co-founders and managing directors of Foodpanda Bangladesh are also among other investors of Shikho.

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