Qureos, a UAE-based education technology startup, announced that it has raised $3 million in its pre-Seed funding round led by Dubai-based COTU Ventures and New York-based Colle Capital.
The round also witnessed participation from global and regional investors, including Globivest, Plutus21 Capital, Dubai Angel Investors, and AlZayani Venture Capital and a number of angel investors including current and former leaders of Swvl, Boston Consulting Group, Moelis & Company, Careem, Cisco Systems, Koinz, Message Bird, Bain & Company, Hiperpool, ADNOC, QIA.
With the recent fundraise, the startup plans to work for a marketing drive to increase awareness and uptake, after a period of ‘organic growth’.
Co-founded by Alexander Epure, Mehrad Yaghmai and Usama Nini in August 2021, Qureos focuses on three areas of skills in particularly high demand with employers: product management, digital marketing and data analytics. In each of these areas, it offers “learning paths”, comprising of a range of short courses that learners can undertake; each one typically requires four to five hours of work over five days or so.
The courses are delivered by mentors that the startup has recruited from private sector leaders such as Google, Paypal, Amazon and Cisco, who deliver learning tailored to the skills they know employees need to develop. Each learner completes the course through project work around a case study, which the Qureos team grades; once they’ve done that, they are entitled to progress through to the jobs side of the platform, where employers recruit for full-time staff and contractors.
Qureos is on a mission to bridge the gap between education and the workplace by changing the way it learns and works for the better.
Speaking about the platform, Co-founder and CEO of Qureos, Alexander Epure, said,
“The experience that we have at Qureos is about learning from others and from industry experts, and through project-based learning or case study solutions. Qureos learning is a shift from self-paced massive open online courses (MOOC), which he said are often hard to scale because they require constant updating. Everyone submits their work, gets feedback, a rating and reflection from the mentors. As such, you learn from peers and from the best in the world.”
Epure further added:
“We have a global footprint today and to sustain it moving forward we are building a team to help us with our growth plans, and this includes building different forms of awareness marketing. We also have an aggressive plan to strengthen our technology and product. The vision is to create an ecosystem that has a validated and unique way of learning that also ensures that trainees have access to world class mentors.”
Qureos claims to have attracted over 25,000 trainees, 200 mentors from big-tech companies like Google, Cisco and Amazon, and 300 business partners that are using its platform to complete tasks.
Commenting on the latest development, Founder and Managing Partner of Colle Capital, Victoria Grace, said,
“We see tremendous opportunity in Qureos’ mission to bridge knowledge gaps and upskill professionals through leveraging the extraordinary pathway with direct mentorship. Simultaneously, this platform provides a fantastic opportunity for highly-skilled individuals to directly monetize their knowledge, compounded by distinct network effects, and for companies to access high-quality and motivated pools of talent.”
The startup’s user-base originates from 133 countries, with about 32% being from Africa, and mainly residing in South Africa and the North Africa region.
