AMMAN
— Two founders, Hamdi Tabbaa and
Hussein Al-Sarabi came together late 2019 to establish
Abwaab, an online education technology
(edtech) start-up in Jordan. A few months later, Sabri Hakim joined them as cofounder.
اضافة اعلان
The
trio created what would become a leading multi-region online edtech platform.
Abwaab’s online platform offers secondary school students live classes to learn
at their own pace from anywhere. Students can test themselves and hone their
skills with the help of expert tutors around the clock.
Before
launching Abwaab,
Tabbaa had successfully expanded Uber’s ride hailing operations
in the MENA region. Sabri Hakim had done the same in his capacity as general
manager of Careem Jordan. Both executives
were acquaintances at first, becoming closer friends after Uber acquired
Careem in January 2020.
Before,
Abwaab’s cofounder, Sarabi, had established
the edtech venture Instructit, a cloud based software-as-a-service (SaaS)
platform that allows anyone to create their own custom white-labeled online
academy.
Each
of Abwaab’s founders has proven entrepreneurial, managerial and technological
qualities that complemented one another, the core requirements for successfully
launching and funding a start-up.
Funding and business model
When Abwaab was officially
announced in March 2020, a few edtech companies were already well established
in the region, attracting regional and international venture capital. Abwaab,
however, with its strategy and its disruptive business model, would prove to be
the regional poster child investors were looking for.
Abwaab’s pre-seed funding was $2.4 million.“One of the largest of its kind in the
region,” the company states on it's website. A year later, in March 2021, the
company would again secure $5.1 million in seed funding.
Then
in November 2021, Abwaab got an eye-popping $20 million in a Series-A funding
round. The speed and size of funding, by MENA-region standards, was
unprecedented.
Abwaab
stands a good chance of becoming its market-region’s Amazon for digital
learning. The founders’ strategy of making digital education highly affordable
could reward them with a dominant market position.
“We
charge students between $50 per full academic year of high quality education
and sometimes we give a 20 percent discount; most edtech platforms charge per
subject while international online education is too expensive for the region’s
average household,” said Hakim, who was appointed Abwaab’s chief operation officer (COO).
Hakim
further emphasizes that Abwaab’s affordable education doesn’t reflect
educational quality. “We prequalify teachers, vet them, and train them on how
to present their content on video.”
Furthermore,
Abwaab applies advanced
artificial intelligence (AI) systems to capture and
analyze the students’ behavioral patterns to optimize learning. “We use AI to
curate learning based on analyzing the students’ own learning preferences. ... We know the student’s weaknesses from tracking
their performance and interaction data and can detect low completion rates on
some videos,” added Hakim.
Abwaab’s
cofounder and CTO Sarabi ensures the company stays at the cutting edge of education
technology. He holds an MSc in computer science with specialization in interactive intelligence from the Georgia
Institute of Technology.
“Our
work takes a long time to plan and execute and it requires a lot of capital to
develop technology,” Hakim added.
Market
The
company’s market entry in 2019 couldn’t have been better timed. After a year,
on March 14, 2020, the Jordanian government suspended all schools after a few cases of
COVID-19 were identified and the disease was
spreading worldwide.
The
Ministry of Education needed help to figure out how education could go
uninterrupted from homes. The ministry asked Abwaab and Mawdoo3, an online Arabic
content site similar to Wikipedia, to join together to develop Darsak, the
online education platform used for teaching over 1 million school-going
students in Jordan.
The
two companies did the job successfully without charging government, despite it
being “challenging financially and technically”, according to Hakim.
Commenting,
“Abwaab literally bought their first client. ... Big early clients are a great
proof of concept; start-ups often buy their first customer to build a track
record,” serial entrepreneur and Jordan Endeavor co-chair, Maher Kaddoura, told
Jordan News.
Kaddoura
is confident the edtech growth trend is continuing. “The digital transformation
of business and government sectors is on fire worldwide ... and because it’s a
bit delayed in Arabic-speaking markets, there’s a lot of growth going forward.”
Abwaab
has significantly grown in its three years of existence, and now counts more
than 500 employees, of whom many are hired part-time as teachers’ assistance.
The
company operates through multiple offices in the region, offering curriculum-based
programs in Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. Earlier this year, it also
started expanding into the wider regions of Asia with its acquisition of
Pakistan’s edtech Edmatrix.
Overall,
the MENA region’s digital industry has hardly scratched the surface of the
education industry. In the MENA region, one in five people are between 10 and
24 years old (school ages) according to
UNICEF reports.
Global
expenditure in education and training is projected to reach $7.3 trillion by
2025. Of that expenditure, a Grand View Research report estimates the global
digital education market size will surpass $77 billion by 2028
and a compounded growth rate of 30 percent annually. Venture capital in edtech
last year surpassed $16 billion, according to
HolonIQ, a platform for impact
market intelligence.
For
edtech ventures like Abwaab, it’s mass retail, as Kaddoura puts it. “Almost
every house has kids who are learning something. ... The size of
Arabic-speaking markets offers an immense investment opportunity and the game
as always is customer acquisition. Abwwab can be flipped
like Udemy, the multibillion-dollar global edtech that recently went public,”
he added.
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