Riyadh-headquartered global edtech Noon Academy has expanded to Pakistan with the launch of its social learning platform. The launch was announced by Noon Academy’s co-founder Aziz Alsaeed in a MENAbytes Live session last Wednesday. This comes less than a month after Noon Academy’s launch in India.
The platform that has raised over USD 21 million to date from some leading investors of the region, including STV and Raed Ventures. It acts as a curated marketplace of teachers, enabling them to schedule and conduct live classes, competitions, polls, and quizzes. They can create public or private groups and invite students to become a part of them. The teachers can also assign homework to students, monitor their performance, and communicate with them.
Noon Academy is starting in Pakistan with classes and groups for 9th to 12th grade, for different boards as well as O- and A-Levels. The platform can be used by students of these grades as an alternative to offline tuition.
It has already brought on board dozens of teachers in the country and is utilizing a freemium model, which means that some content for the students will be available for free and some would require them to pay.
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The startup has hired former McKinsey consultant Umair Chishti, who has previously also worked with local food delivery startup Eat Mubarak, to lead Pakistan. It is also in the process of hiring for other positions based in Lahore.
Aziz Alsaeed, the co-founder and COO of Noon Academy, said during his conversation with MENAbytes Live that the company is eyeing more international markets and will launch in new locations soon. He also revealed for the first time that Careem’s co-founder and CEO, Mudassir Sheikha, is one of the investors in the company.
Noon Academy has over 7 million registered students on its platform in Saudi, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, India, and Pakistan.
This article first appeared in MENAbytes.