Klas, a Nigerian online education platform, earned $1 million in pre-seed investment from Ingressive Capital, Techstars, HoaQ, and angel investors. Klas lets users sell ebooks, courses, and live lessons. Nathan Nwachuku and Lekan Adejumo founded it in 2022.
The platform provides scheduling, payments, community features, analytics, and video conferencing for coding, design, finance, art, and language classes.
Think about it like Shopify. Klas helps people build up online schools and operate lessons, similar to what they do for online stores, where anyone can sell anything online, co-founder and CEO Nwachuku told Eltrys.
Nwachuku created Klas at 18. He had a six-month hiatus from school three years earlier after losing an eye in an accident. After recovering from a two-month coma, Nwachuku considered creating an online physics program where he might be paid to teach. However, he faced complexity in current systems, which inspired Klas, a simplified alternative.
After finishing high school and self-taught coding, the entrepreneur was denied a scholarship to Canada and dropped out of college, according to the call. He focused on Klas full-time and found his co-founder and CTO Adejumo in 2021 before raising an angel round of $180,000, launching the platform, and entering Techstars the following year. Nigerian internet business entrepreneurs Odun Eweniyi and Tola Adesanmi invested in that round.
Nwachuku saw a market vacuum where mature platforms like Kajabi and Thinkific might overwhelm first-time consumers. Thus, Klas could capitalize on its late mover advantage by offering a simple toolset and user-friendly experience, allowing beginners to easily host engaging online classes amid rising global demand for online education, especially for platforms to train the next workforce.
We’re hyper-focused on a closed ecosystem, unlike other huge corporations that are integration toolkits and completely integrated into the platform. They may provide Zoom or Google Meet for class experiences and Slack for class administration. Klas developed everything, including our virtual school, from scratch. KlasLife, our product, was designed from scratch with a unique video architecture and doesn’t use any video API, he said.
Over 5,000 online schools (creators) have made “hundreds of thousands of dollars” on Klas, according to Nwachuku, and 300,000 learners from over 30 nations utilize it. It is one of the few African firms offering a worldwide audience, yet most of its users are Nigerian. The edtech startup, which currently processes transactions in naira for Nigerians and dollars for non-Nigerians, wants to expand to India, its second-largest market, and North America, where the incumbents have most of their customers. In response to currency weakening, the business hopes to improve user experiences with customized currency alternatives in several nations.
Klas offers a free plan with a 5% transaction charge to power 100,000 online schools by 2027. Klas, positioned as a cost-effective alternative to Kajabi and Thinkific (whose prices range from $49 to $399), may become as expensive in the coming months by introducing a $199 per month enterprise product to upskill employees in large companies.
“It has been a rewarding experience to have invested in Klas at the earliest stage of the company based on the core abilities of the co-founders Nathan and Lekan and the vision they set for the company,” Techstars Toronto managing director Sunil Sharma said. “This confidence was further demonstrated by our follow-on investment in the company, something we like to do with exceptional opportunities.”
