• Saudi Arabia-based edtech for pre-schoolers has raised a $1.1 million Seed round from EdVentures, the VC arm of Egypt-based Nahdet Misr Publishing Group.
• Founded in 2020 by Ahmed Sobaih, Jeel is an edutainment platform for pre-schoolers that provides them with educational content prepared by a group of psychologists and educators.
• In 2017, Nahdet Misr launched its edtech VC, EdVentures, which offers incubation, acceleration and investment programmes for startups operating in the education sector.

Press release:

EdVentures, the corporate VC arm of Egypt’s leading learning company, Nahdet Misr Publishing Group, has announced a $1.1 million investment in Jeel, an education and entertainment platform for pre-schoolers. 

EdVentures organised a summit on the future of edtech in the Mena region, in collaboration with HolonIQ, the world’s leading platform for impact market intelligence based in the US.

The 2022 Global Impact Summit comes as EdVentures celebrates its fifth anniversary and whereby EdVentures showcased the future of Edtech and investment opportunities in the Middle East and North Africa.

“Driven by the need to transform the edtech sector locally and regionally, we established EdVentures in 2017, managed to support more than 66 startups, and invested in 13 companies with a market capitalisation of $75 million, creating 1,400 jobs,” commented Dalia Ibrahim, Nahdet Misr Publishing House CEO and Founder of EdVentures. “Moving forward, EdVentures is seeking more investments in EdTech startups, while expanding globally,” she added. 

As for Mena’s edtech landscape, according to Holon IQ’s latest data, Egypt has the largest share in the growing edtech ecosystems across the region, which is home to 1,500 edtech companies, followed by the UAE and KSA. Workforce and corporate training innovation represent almost half of all education technology founded and headquartered in Mena, followed by the K-12 education, and higher education, while the pre-k makes up a very small part of the overall education technology landscape. 

Panel discussions tackled ways to embrace lifelong learning and continuous development in K-12 and higher education; investing in Edtech amid global challenges and economic instabilities, and the power of partnerships to engage the whole education ecosystem.   

At the closure of the event, HolonIQ announced its annual list of the 50 best EdTech startups from the Mena region, which included nine startups of EdVentures portfolio; iSchool, Akhdar, COLNN, OTO, Entreprenelle, Sprints, Career 180 and EYouth.