Nearpeer bagged an investment at 6 figure (USD) valuation from Shopistan.pk. Nearpeer is incubated by Ilm Ideas 2 and is Plan9’s startup. It is a platform for Massive Open Online Course. It offers a wide range of online video courses. These online courses are institution-specific.
The MOOC wants to promote education system in Pakistan via Al. Ammar Ali Ayub and Shahrukh Swati are behind this revolutionary idea. The two are talented alumni of LUMS. They are also its co-founders.
Ammar seemed really happy and positive about the investment. He said,
“Half a million students graduate from university annually in Pakistan but not enough jobs are created to absorb all of them. My team always had a motto; instead of becoming a burden on an overburdened economy of Pakistan, we are going to create opportunities within our economy by introducing more jobs.
Before even graduating from LUMS, we had created new opportunities for almost 22 people. Now this partnership with Shopistan will help us further this motto as we’ll be expanding into more universities and markets at an accelerated rate.”
There is a long list of online courses available but there is no such platform where you can find all the online courses. The problem is solved and Shahrukh was of the view,
“As a student at College and university level, I always felt the gaps in the education system. Monotonous classes, little complementary resources outside the classroom, and irrelevant and scattered online resources used to make the process difficult. Expensive MCAT/ECAT academies used to be a huge burden on my parents.
In the era where things like booking a cab, and ordering the food have been made simpler, why can’t education process made easier too? I tried, and Thanks to Allah Almighty, I succeeded. With this technology partnership we’re going to introduce Artificial Intelligence (AI) into the education system and generate great content for markets of MCAT, ECAT, O/A’Levels, FSc, and similar markets in coming two years.”
Ali Aziz also spoke about the partnership. He said,
“We are making an investor syndicate and this is our first investment in a startup. We are aiming to promote education and health in Pakistan’s ecosystem. Our main purpose is to help startups with their technology in order to enable them to focus on their business side and make the next round of raising investment easier for them.”
According to the buzz Nearpeer claims to promote O-levels, A-levels, and MCAT and ECAT markets in Pakistan. They also plan to provide free courses to the university market. The cities under research are like Multan, Bahawalpur, Sargodha etc.
Dr. Umar Saif is supporting the investor community. He said,
“It is heartening to see investors putting faith in young entrepreneurs. One after another news of investment in a startup is the validation of the fact that this startup culture is growing and will reach heights of success in near future.”
Since 2015 the Nearpeer has gained a lot of popularity. When it started it had only 1200 paying customers and 3000 users overall. Now the stats have risen to 2500 paying customers and 6200 online users.
Nearpeer is offering 55 courses and plans to offer more in the time to come. They have branches in LUMS, LSE and Chartered Accountants Market. They plan to set their feet in GIKI, PIEAS, NUST, ITU and FAST soon.