The problem
On a class trip to a workerless Lego factory in Hungary, LAU student Ibrahim Ezzeddine saw the automated future firsthand — and came home to Lebanese classrooms with no robotics curricula, no kits, and no teachers trained to deliver them.
How it works
Cherpa sells schools ready-to-teach gamified courses in robotics, electronics, coding, and circuit-building: the school buys a course for a fixed student headcount and the teacher runs it with Cherpa’s lesson plans, slides, and training videos. Content is created with experts from NASA and Google plus an education specialist matching levels to ages. The founders deliberately chose this teacher-present B2B model after finding students quit self-serve tools out of frustration.
Pain points
Empty school robotics offerings, teachers unable to teach what they were never taught, kids bouncing off solo coding apps, and parents worried their children will graduate into robot-run job markets.
Business model
Paid per-course licensing to school administrations, starting with upper-end private Lebanese schools that can pay, then using public pilots and Gulf business development for the next leg.
Challenges
Most Lebanese schools lack funds, infrastructure, and connectivity; content must stay level-appropriate across five-plus tracks; and Gulf expansion means re-running the same school-by-school sales playbook abroad.
Funding
- Prizes: Best Youth Startup and $15,000 at GITEX Future Stars in Dubai (Oct 2017), part of a Speed@BDD delegation of 13 Lebanese-founded startups; earlier won the SeedBoost competition at Speed Lebanon and was a MITEF Pan Arab semifinalist (Blog Baladi; MENAbytes; Wamda).
Latest — Aug 2019
On 6 August 2019 Executive Magazine profiled Cherpa at 18 Lebanese schools with 1,600 students through at least one course, a fifth course on cybersecurity just launched, a one-year pilot slated for five public schools via the education ministry, and first footholds in one Saudi school plus after-school centers in Spain and Portugal — with Gulf penetration next (Executive Magazine).