Edukoya's record $3.5M pre-seed for online K-12 tutoring ended in a 2025 shutdown

Edukoya was built on an obvious pain: Nigerian classrooms are overcrowded and under-equipped, so parents already spent heavily on after-school exam-prep centers. Founder Honey Ogundeyi, who had helped launch the Kuda neobank, bet that an all-online platform for grades 10–12, bundling JAMB and WASSCE question banks, homework help and live tutors, could replace those offline centers and reach more families.

The startup made history before the product matured. In December 2021 it raised $3.5M in pre-seed funding led by Target Global, then the largest round at that stage in Nigeria or Africa, with angels including Paystack CEO Shola Akinlade. Edukoya claimed beta students scored 96% higher in recent tests, and aimed to prove the model on one tight segment before expanding to more grades and subjects.

What followed was a pricing trap. Edukoya paid tutors roughly ₦200,000 (~$133) monthly, far above typical teacher wages, to guarantee quality, but parents would not pay enough for subscriptions and the free tier never converted at scale. After merger and partnership talks failed, the company shut down in February 2025, leaving Nigerian edtech observers to question whether exam-prep platforms can survive where affordability and infrastructure lag.

Edukoya's collapse contrasts with career-oriented schools like AltSchool Africa that sold outcomes students could monetize, and with uLesson, which tuned pricing and content to local willingness to pay.