• Saudi Arabia-based edtech iStoria has raised an undisclosed pre-Seed funding round from Nama Ventures.
• Founded in August 2020 by Abdullah AlJaberi, Faisal AlHomoud. AlJaberi, Abdulnaser Wail and Ismail Ashour, iStoria teaches English to adults through a "graded reading" method.

Press release:

iStoria, a Saudi application specialising in helping busy people to improve their English language through reading interesting stories, has announced that it has raised an undisclosed amount in pre-Seed funding round by Nama Ventures.​

Previously, it was tough for learners to learn English through the traditional ways. That was not long until iStoria was launched to help users easily learn English using the ‘graded reader’ method with additional helpful features.

iStoria was founded in August 2020 by Abdullah AlJaberi and Dr Faisal AlHomoud. AlJaberi, who has over 15 years of experience in building technical products, and Dr Al-Homoud, a domain expert in English learning programs & content for more than 20 years, have dedicated their experience to building an application that offers learners a unique solution to learning English. However, they needed a CTO, COO, and Marketing Manager to keep the ongoing success. So, they came to their former colleagues; Eng. Abdulnaser Wail as a COO with more than 10 years of experience, Eng. Ismail Ashour, as a CTO with over 10 years of experience, and the incredible Marketing Manager Khalid AlRashed who achieves impressive performance. They all made a huge difference in understanding the learners’ tendency towards learning through technology, and then they efficiently met the learners' needs with iStoria.

“We are looking for a guaranteed and tested method to improve the English language, such as the graded reader method. So, iStoria came to digitise it and make it easier with additional supported features. We have a very close relationship with our customers, so we quickly understand their needs. That is the reason why we have been getting high ratings since we please our customers. Our mission is to make learning the English language enjoyable with an easy way for busy people, and we can no longer make excuses for not learning English!”

“The journey of iSoria’s founding is not a typical one that we usually see at Nama Ventures,” said Mohammed Alzubi, Founder and Managing Partner at Nama Ventures.” It's rare that we see a technical person be the initiator of the startup. Abdullah is part of a special breed of founders that call sell and do, he’s a serial entrepreneur and found his new passion in providing a scalable solution to help Saudis and eventually, all Arabs learn at their own pace” Mohammed added, “But as we all know, Entrepreneurship is a team sport, so Abdullah realised early on that he can't go at it alone and decided to partner with Dr Faisal, a published subject matter expert to help bridge the knowledge gap on the domain, Abdulnaser to drive operations and make sure “stuff gets done”, Ismail to translate the vision of the founders into code, and Khalid to drive marketing.  The result of this dream team is the amazing iStoria application.  So if you want to learn English at your own pace, do it via iStoria."