Knowledge Officer, an EdTech London-based startup launched by Egyptians has raised $834,000 in a seed round led by Middle Eastern angel investor Abdullah AlShaheen and Ian Hurlock who previously was a VP at Interactive Media.
The startup was founded by Ahmed El-Sharkasy and Ahmed Eshra, who both have experience in the startup field, where El-Sharkasy previously worked with Cairo-based startup Bkam, and Eshra worked in the engineering field for various companies in Saudi and Egypt.
So what does Knowledge Officer actually do? The online platform offers users an engaging learning experience through its app which is currently available only on iOS. Right after the user signs into Knowledge Officer, they get to choose their topics of interest and identify their current level of knowledge. The app then offers a personalized learning path for the user backed by curated resources – articles and videos. Throughout it all, users undergo a series of quizzes that assess their learning progress, and even rewards users with learning credits as they progress.
Ahmed, the co-founder & CEO of Knowledge Officer explained the purpose of his startup stating: “We see the world is shifting into discovery and recommendation more than search. You open Netflix and watch the recommended films, you do the same with Spotify to listen to the best relevant music and even with Amazon, people are discovering items that they even did not know they want to buy! And as you don’t know what you don’t know, we want our product to serve the future of recommendation and discovery in education and learning.”
According to Ahmed, Knowledge Officer is the first to bring up the idea of filtering clickbait and building a machine learning model that helps people cut out the noise. Although there are other similar products to Knowledge Officer, Ahmed believes that their startup has a different value proposition.
“We are the first to talk about the idea of personalized and also goal-oriented learning recommendation based on career goals. The rest are generally “Learning” platforms: learn how to code, learn new skills, etc,” he said. He adds that while the rest are creating their own content, Knowledge Officer curates their content, which enables them to scale faster. “These solutions are good if you know what you don’t know. Our product helps you reveal the unknown and answer the question of “What should I learn today” based on your profile and goals,” Ahmed said.
With the new investment, the startup plans on growing their team and achieve their product-market fit.
For more information about Knowledge Officer, read here.