Company profile

Edves is an AI-powered school-management and learning platform for K–12 schools. It digitises school operations and enables schools to engage pupils and parents via a web platform and mobile app. Schools using Edves can rely on a complete technology platform that improves learning management, digitises parent engagement and handles their accounting systems.

Why we invested

Sub-Saharan Africa's population is set to double by 2050, and the region is already short of the schools and teachers it needs, with close to 100 million children out of school today and roughly 15 million teachers still needed by 2030. The simple solution is to build more schools and hire more teachers. But even with additional classrooms and teachers, this infrastructural gap will not close without the adoption of digital infrastructure.

This presents an opportunity: make the classrooms that already exist work better. This is what Edves is achieving. Their use of Artificial Intelligence to adapt lesson flow and difficulty in real time, generate coaching prompts for teachers, and automate grading and reporting to reduce the strain on teachers was, and is still, one way they reeled us in. We, at Octerra, back the founders who are highly curious and come up with game-changing ideas.

This is a game-changing idea in one of the most critical spaces in any society.

Ultimately, the timing sealed it for us. Five years earlier and the same product pitched by the same founders would have failed to move us. The world (and especially Nigeria) simply wasn’t ready for it. In 2016, schools and parents were not ready to trade paper for screens.

By the time we backed them the market had crossed over, public budgets were turning towards education, and Edves was already the system thousands of schools ran on, with more than 2,300 across Nigeria, Ghana and Zimbabwe today – which also proved the adaptability of their business model in different geographies, further convicting us of the opportunity to scale this solution.

To us, Edves is a useful reminder that conviction in a company is sometimes a wager on timing: the founders and the technology were ready, but it took a global societal adjustment to turn a brilliant idea with no market into one of the clearest opportunities we had seen.