Maqsad, a Karachi-based educational technology company, has raised $2.1 million in a pre-seed round headed by Indus Valley Capital. Taha Ahmed and Rooshan Aziz quit their professions in strategy consulting and investment banking in London earlier this year to launch Maqsad, a mobile-only education platform with the purpose of “making education more accessible to 100 million Pakistani students.”Ahmed and Aziz, childhood friends who grew up in Karachi, are well aware of the issues facing Pakistan’s education system, which is particularly difficult for people who do not live-in large cities (the country’s student-teacher ratio is 44:1). According to Maqsad co-founder Aziz, for every kilometre of distance between school and home, Pakistani children are four times less likely to attend school.According to Aziz, Maqsad would use the funds to build in-house content, such as a production studio, academics, and animators, as well as strengthen R&D and engineering.
For the next one to two years, the company will focus on K-12 education in Pakistan, including 11th and 12th grade math, with ambitions to expand into other STEM courses, according to Aziz.In Urdu, the word “maqsad” signifies “purpose.”“Everyone, we feel, serves a role. Maqsad’s mission is to help Pakistani students achieve this goal; whether you’re from a major city like Lahore or a small village in Sindh, Maqsad believes in equal chance for everyone,” Aziz remarked.Indus Valley Capital led the pre-seed round, which was completed in only three weeks via virtual meetings, with Alter Global, Fatima Gobi Ventures, and many angel investors from Pakistan, the Middle East, and Europe participating.Maqsad’s platform, which offers a one-stop shop for after-school academic content in a mix of English and Urdu, will be augmented by quizzes and other gamified features, all of which will work together to provide individuals with a personalised education.Adaptive testing, which changes the complexity of a question based on the responses of users, is one of the platform’s capabilities, according to Aziz.“Given that mobile is used by 95 percent of broadband users in Pakistan, we’re designing a mobile-first platform. The majority of other platforms aren’t mobile-friendly,” Aziz noted.