Ed-tech Startup Knowledge Officer Founded By Egyptians Secures USD 500 K Grant

Knowledge Officer, an application that gauges skills and creates personalized learning paths to help users achieve their career goals, has won a grant valued at USD 500 K.

The research grant dubbed ‘Smart’ came from Innovate UK, United Kingdom’s innovation agency. Smart is the UK’s open grant funding programme that invests in best game-changing, innovative or disruptive ideas with a view to commercialization.

The path-to-employment platform was founded in 2017 by Ahmed El-Sharkasy and Ahmed Eshra, both of Egyptian descent. Though it has an office in Egypt, it’s headquartered in London, UK.

It aims to tweak the learning process by creating a short, efficient path to employment career progression. Ahmed El-Sharkasy says he wants the platform to serve the future of recommendation and discovery.

By leveraging artificial intelligence, Knowledge Officer gauges important skills needed in various fields and determines where the user will need to focus on the most, depending on the chosen career line. It then provides quality and effective learning materials and an in-app mentor for job matching. In addition, it has partnered with Adzuna, ZipRecruiter and other recruitment platforms for job sourcing.

“You just tell us more about yourself and what are your career goals and we take you on an the best and most engaging learning experience step by step. You don’t want to go to a MOOC to search for courses because you probably don’t know what you need to search for.”said Ahmed, the co-founder & CEO of Knowledge Officer.

The grant will be used to scale up its machine learning team in London and expand their team of five there. Winning the grant was validation not only of the significance of the problem that Knowledge Officer is trying to solve, but also of their model’s effectiveness.

In 2017, the global expenditure on corporate training was approximately USD 359 Bn. Though a competitive space, this reinforces the idea that disruptive technologies need to come up and serve the need for affordable, efficient education and training.

Currently, the platform has more than 100 K users now with a few thousand active users on a weekly basis. By 2018, its app had recorded 2500 downloads. It looks to reach a stable MRR by the end of 2019 from both B2C and B2B revenue streams.

The startup had raised around USD 742 K in March last year from angel investors who included Ian Hurlock who was previously a VP at Fox Interactive Media and Abdullah AlShaheen.

Featured Image Courtesy: MENAbytes