Does Edukoya want to become fintech?
Employees at the Nigerian edtech say the company fired most of its staff at its Nigeria office amid plans to pivot.
Edukoya, the online learning platform that raised $3.5 million in 2021, in a pre-seed round led by Tiger Global may have laid off many of its employees.
A former Edukoya employee told TechCabal that the firm fired most of its workforce amid plans to build a new fintech service.
“The truth about Edukoya is that it’s moving away from focus at the moment,” a former employee told TechCabal, “At the moment she [CEO Honey Ogundeyin] stopped a lot of things on the educational technology aspect,” said the former employee, adding that most of the employees remaining at the firm are software developers.
But Edukoya says it fired only four employees after a quarterly employee review. In an emailed response to TechCabal, Edukoya said that while it had “optimized” its teams, it is still hiring new workers and recently hired a senior executive from Byju’s, the Indian edtech headquarters in Bangalore.
Two former employees who spoke to TechCabal claim that the company not only let go of several of its employees, it is changing its brand name to Koya, a fintech for children and teenagers.
A former employee said Edukoya was already attending Koya-branded events. The event in question was this year’s edition of the TOTAL school support seminar and exhibition which was held earlier this month.
Edukoya denies this and says it will “continue to provide access to high quality education for the next generation of Africans”.
Whatever Edukoya claims, this much is certain, it is at least bundling a fintech product into its edtech offering.
Koya appears to be a fintech product for secondary school students – the same demographic as current Edukoya users. The product appears to be a savings app plus debit card for school-aged children that will help “teach them money skills.”
A now-deleted landing page, koyakids.com, described Koya as a “debit card and financial learning app for kids and teens.”
Koya offers prepaid debit cards and a savings app to children between the ages of 3 and 18 for a monthly membership fee of ₦2,500.
Edukoya was founded in 2021 by Honey Ogundeyin, former Country Director, UK-Nigeria Tech Hub. She was also the founding CMO of Kuda, one of Nigeria’s leading digital challenger banks.
Edukoya allows users to review past national student exams for free on the app, but charges a fee for students who want to be tutored. For example, one of their offerings, a coding course, costs up to ₦66,000 a month per student.
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