• Egypt-based edtech Educatly has raised a $1 million pre-Seed round from Falak Startups, Enterprise Island along with a group of angel investors.
• Founded by Mohamed ElSonbaty, Abdelrahman Ayman and Joan Manuel, Educatly democratises access to higher education opportunities.
• Since its inception in late 2020, the startup's userbase has grown to 100,000 users across 190 countries.

Press release:

EdTech platform Educatly announces that it closed Pre-seed funding for $1M with contributions from Enterprise Ireland, the Falak Startups and other Angel Investors. This pre-Seed round follows the launch of the platform in late 2020. 

Educatly is a platform that allows students to search, compare and apply to over 120,000 live and up-to-date higher education opportunities globally. Since that launch, the user base has grown to over 100,000 users from 190 countries worldwide and around half a million programs viewed.

Mohammed El Sonbaty, CEO & Founder of Educatly, expands on the challenges facing the education ecosystem "the challenge Educatly addresses affects millions of students and educators globally. In the last few decades, the world has seen an incredible speed in digital transformation across every sector, however, some of those sectors are lacking behind this speed, and we are concerned about education as the global education ecosystems is fragmented and largely dependent on infrastructure we built ages ago which no longer fits the way we operate today and that has a lot of negative implications in how transparent but also efficient people access their lifelong learnings." 

Educatly is on a mission to digitally map and integrate the world education ecosystems to make it simple. It is building for education what LinkedIn has built for jobs. Educatly aspires to build the world's most comprehensive educational network to showcase all schools/colleges, programs as well as scholarships, language courses, professors, students, and alumni. Educatly leverages the power of technology to connect all educational stakeholders in a digital environment. 

“COVID-19 has put universities at the same time under huge pressure to digitize not just their educational programs, but also the way they present their programs and interact with interested students. Student recruitment is already a very costly challenge for universities globally, where many universities rely on external support through local agencies to recruit students to fill their classes. 60% of Universities in the US rely on agencies to reach their recruitment goals, however, what is mostly unknown is that universities are paying between 10 and 30% of students fee as commission per enrollment to these agencies who at most time funnel students to their partners despite student potential and interest" says Joan Manuel, Co-Founder, and CCO. 

Since the launch of Educatly, the startup was relying on bootstrapping until they closed this pre-Seed Round. During this period, Educatly had impressive traction, they have onboarded 450+ schools to work with around the globe, in addition, to over 45,000 student profiles on the platform. Eductaly will build on this growth by using the investment to develop their product, bring core team members, and scale their marketing and sales operations.

“Students want to have transparent access to all relevant opportunities out there while getting as personalized support as possible to reach the best possible decision. At educatly.com, users can browse through the largest up-to-date database globally with more than 120.000 higher education opportunities worldwide and filter according to their profile and preferences to find the programs most relevant for them. We leverage the latest technologies to narrow down the most relevant programs to support the decision-making process for them and offer personalized support through our network of consultants and ambassadors” - says Abdelrahman Ayman, Co-Founder, and COO.

With the support of Falak Startups and Enterprise Ireland, Educatly will achieve its growth plans faster by integrating new technologies like AI and Blockchain that will lead to maximizing the value they offer to their customers. Educatly aspires to give every student transparent access and guidance to what the world of education has to offer, and their vision is to be able to tap into the entire student educational journey and help through technology to facilitate their experience in the best way possible.