Edukoya, a Nigerian education technology firm, has shut down after three years of operation, claiming that insufficient infrastructure and financial difficulties prevented it from growing.
However, the firm, which in 2021 received $3.5 million, Africa’s highest pre-seed fundraising, stated that it will return investors’ money instead of continuing in what it called an unsustainable market climate.
Edukoya claimed in a statement accessed by BrandSpur national news desk on Wednesday that, despite its early success, it had fundamental adoption issues, such as low internet penetration, expensive devices, and dwindling disposable budgets, which made it difficult for its target audience to afford digital education services.
Edukoya, which was launched to revolutionise digital learning for K–12 (primary and secondary) children, quickly acquired popularity. It hosted thousands of live tutoring sessions, onboarded over 80,000 students, and enabled millions of practice questions. It looked into strategic options like mergers, collaborations, and business model changes, but was unable to find a workable solution.
The statement partly reads: “Having explored various strategies to sustain operations—including partnerships, mergers, and business model shifts—without success, we’ve made the difficult decision to shut down and return capital to investors rather than exhaust resources in an unsupportive market.
“This strategic shutdown—though counterintuitive in a startup culture that emphasizes persistence at all costs—creates better outcomes for everyone: our investors can redeploy capital, our team can transition with dignity, and we preserve our vision’s integrity instead of compromising to survive,” it added.
The closure of Edukoya brings to light the wider challenges facing the edtech industry in Africa, where entrepreneurs must strike a balance between creativity and the realities of infrastructure shortages and financial limitations. Although there is still a lot of potential in the digital learning business, widespread adoption is still a long way off.
However, while its adventure is coming to an end, Edukoya thanked its team, parents, students, and investors, adding that the knowledge it has gathered may help pave the road for future advances in African edtech—when the market is ready to support them.
