EdVentures, the venture capital arm of Egypt’s leading learning company, Nahdet Misr Publishing Group, has organized a summit on the future of Edtech in the MENA region, in collaboration with HolonIQ, the world’s leading platform for impact market intelligence based in the US.
The 2022 Global Impact Summit comes as EdVentures celebrates its fifth anniversary and whereby EdVentures showcased the future of Edtech and investment opportunities in the Middle East and North Africa.
“Driven by the need to transform the EdTech sector locally and regionally, we established EdVentures in 2017, and managed to support more than 66 startups, and invested in 13 companies with a market capitalization of $75 million, creating 1,400 jobs,” commented Dalia Ibrahim, Nahdet Misr Publishing House CEO and Founder of EdVentures. She also announced that EdVentures will be investing $1.1 million in Jeel, an education and entertainment platform for pre-schoolers. “Moving forward, EdVentures is seeking more investments in EdTech startups, while expanding globally,” she added.
The Summit included three panel discussions that covered several topics such ways to embrace lifelong learning and continuous development in K-12 and higher education; investing in Edtech amidst global challenges and economic instabilities, and the power of partnerships to engage the whole education ecosystem. The event saw the attendance of a number of high-level representatives from prestigious educational institutions, including Coursera, Abdulla Al Ghurair Foundation for Education, Qatar Foundation’s World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE), Honoris United Universities, Luminus Education, AUC Venture Lab and Cubit Ventures.
Patrick Brothers, Co-CEO and Co-Founder of HolonIQ, said: “We are delighted to be partnering with EdVentures, one of the largest and most influential institutions in the Edtech sector in Egypt and the Middle East, as it supports our vision towards bridging the gaps in the education sector and discovering more strengths to enhance them.”
Brothers added that HolonIQ has examined more than 3,000 start-ups using the latest methods of machine learning to find the strongest areas and available investment opportunities and monitor the gaps to bridge them. “The education sector needs more financial support and more innovation to ensure progress and development,” he added.
As for MENA’s Edtech landscape, Egypt has the largest share in the growing EdTech ecosystems across the region, which is home to 1,500 Edtech companies, followed by the UAE and KSA. according to Holon IQ’s latest data.
Workforce and corporate training innovation represents almost half of all education technology founded and headquartered in MENA, followed by the K-12 education, higher education, while the pre-k makes up a very small part of the overall education technology landscape.
At the closure of the event, HolonIQ announced its annual list of the 50 best EdTech startups from the MENA region, which included 9 startups of EdVentures portfolio; iSchool, Akhdar, COLNN, OTO, Entreprenelle, Sprints, Career 180 and EYouth.
