10 Minute School is one of the largest Edtech companies in Bangladesh offering affordable and accessible education for K-12 school and college students, university admission entrance exams, skill development for job-seekers and people looking for specialised skills training.
Initially started as a YouTube channel in 2015, today 10 Minute School (abbreviated as 10MS) is a full-fledged online learning platform which provides pre-recorded lessons and live classes through its mobile application and website.
10MS recently raised its pre-Series A round of $5.5 million funding led by Conjunction Capital, with participation from returning investor Peak XV‘s Surge (formerly Sequoia Capital India and Southeast Asia), the Bangladesh government’s sovereign venture fund, Startup Bangladesh Limited, CRED founder and CEO Kunal Shah, and several angel investors.
This is the highest seed-stage funding so far for a Bangladeshi startup, and the new round brings 10MS total funding raised to $7.5 million. Now it plans to invest in tech capabilities, content and operations to provide personalised learning experiences for students.
Beginning of the Journey
10 Minute School was started by Ayman Sadiq as a YouTube channel in 2015 where he himself uploaded videos teaching Mathematics, English and Science. He previously was a teacher at a leading coaching centre in Dhaka, and as he was well-versed in how students like to study, his videos began to get good viewership in just a few months.
When he was teaching in the coaching centre, co-founder Sadiq realized the problems of students travelling to the capital city, Dhaka to prepare for their university admission exams because of the lack of good education in rural areas.
The cost of tuition fees and moving to the capital city could only be afforded by children of rich people. “That’s when the naive idea came into being that I could record all the videos and upload them onto YouTube for free, so no one needed to come to the capital city and no one needed to pay anything,” Sadiq says.
With this noble idea of democratising education for all, Sadiq started his YouTube channel and after completing 100K subscribers, he realized that the idea was scalable. Soon he was joined by the other co-founders Abdullah Abyad Raied and Mirza Salman Hossain Beg in 2021 and then they together embarked on creating paid courses and premium lessons.
Today, 10 Minute School has over 2.8 million subscribers on its YouTube channel, more than a million app downloads on Play Store, and lakhs of paid users learning from their platform and upskilling in life.
Funding and Future Plans
As 10MS was initially only a YouTube channel, the founder Ayman Sadiq has been sustaining it through sponsors and brand promotions in his videos for five years. Then the pandemic hit leading to sponsors dropping out, and then he thought to create paid courses and launch a premium edtech platform.
After getting 100,000 paid users on its first premium product, a paid book and course, 10MS began looking for investors and in 2022, it raised $2 in seed funding led by Surge, Sequoia India (now Peak XV)’s scale-up program.
The journey kept on going, and today it has more than 25,000 videos, and skills courses prepared by some of the best instructors in Bangladesh. It also recently surpassed three million users, making it the country’s largest EdTech company.
Now 10MS has raised a pre-Series A of $5.5 million, the highest seed-stage funding so far for a Bangladeshi startup, which it plans to invest in its tech capabilities, content and operations.
Co-founder and COO Mirza Salman Hossain Beg also added that 10MS’ goal is to provide personalized learning experiences for students by using AI and it will bring in more engineers and product managers to support its tech development.
Edtech has the opportunity to democratize access to education, and Beg says, “The fundamental problem that needs to be solved is access to quality content and teachers in a very affordable manner.”
