From left: VentureWave's Brian Martin, iSchool's Muhammad Gawish, VentureWave's Alan Foy and iSchool's Ibrahim Abdullah and Mostafa Abdelmoneim.
iSchool plans to use Ireland as a base to expand its online coding platform globally and plans to swiftly expand into six additional countries in the Middle East and North Africa.
Edtech start-up iSchool is shifting its headquarters to Ireland after raising $4.5m, as the company looks to expand globally.
The funding round was led by Irish VC VentureWave Capital and included participation from OneStop Capital UK, Webit Investment Network and Oraseya Capital – the VC arm of Dubai Integrated Economic Zones Authority.
The Egypt-based start-up offers an online coding platform for students aged six to 18, with a curriculum that includes AI, VR, app development, game development and web development. The company was founded in 2018 and has obtained more than 26,000 students who have collectively written more than 10m lines of code.
iSchool now plans to grow a new team in Dublin and use Ireland as the location to scale its services up globally. The edtech plans to use the $4.5m to quickly expand into six additional countries in the Middle East and North Africa. iSchool also plans to scale up its online coding platform and extend its gamified online classroom app service throughout Sub-Saharan Africa.
Muhammad Gawish, the co-founder and CEO of iSchool, said the company aims to give students around the world access to thousands of “top-notch coding instructors” from the comfort of their own homes.
“Our mission is to empower today’s generations to become tomorrow’s technology leaders beginning in the Middle East and Africa, spreading to the rest of the world,” Gawish said. “Using dynamic technology and a deep understanding of the end-to-end live classes process, we are growing a simple idea into a product that we believe can improve the lives of millions of people.
“We are delighted to be joined by a number of vastly-experienced and strategic investors, whose expertise will not only play a vital role ahead of our future expansion, but also in our current activities managing national-level initiatives in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.”
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