Pandai, a Kuala Lumpur-based education technology firm, has raised US$2 million in its pre-seed round led by Y Combinator, Global Founders Capital, and 500 Global.
The round also saw participation from Soma Capital, Harvard Management Company, RHL Ventures, Falnas Capital, Kembara Kapital.
With the new financing, the company plans to acquire more customers in Malaysia and improve the technology and content side of its product. It currently has around 37 employees spread out between its technology and content divisions.
Co-founded by Khairul Anwar Mohamad Zaki, Mohd Suhaimi Ramly and Mohd Akmal Akhpah in January 2020, Pandai is a learning app that focuses on K-12 learning and assessment to help school students perform better in school. Through Pandai, students learn using gamified quizzes which are aligned to the curriculum and receive personalized analysis using artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms that allows them to identify their strengths and weaknesses.
Pandai is on a mission to transform the learning space with technology. The platform's content is designed to be dynamic in order to support students from other countries, with bilingual (Bahasa Melayu and English) content for Mathematics and Sciences. In order to support students' achievements beyond school, Pandai also provides extracurricular content such as competition preparation material for mathematics, science and computational thinking.
Speaking about the company, Chief Executive Officer of Pandai, Khairul Anwar Mohamad Zaki, said in a statement, "We still want to improve the stickiness of our app and prolong the time that users spend in the app."
The startup has recently launched modules that would allow parents to monitor their child’s activities and let teachers tap into the firm’s question bank.
Backed by Y Combinator, Pandai currently has more than 300,000 registered users in the Malaysian market alone. Dedicated functions for parents and teachers are also integrated to monitor and support students' progress.
To date, users spend around 57 minutes a day on the app, and the company wants to push that number to 90 minutes and boost its monthly active users as well.
Last year in August, Pandai had raised $125,000 in a pre-Seed round led by Y Combinator.
