The problem
After 23 years of high-school teaching, Siroun Shamigian watched every subject except Arabic transform with technology: students’ Arabic grades stayed the lowest, and Arabic teachers — herself and co-founder Nisrine El Makkouk among them — worked extra hours hand-building content because nothing tailored to Arabic existed.
How it works
Kamkalima (meaning “a few words”) is a web-based platform for grades 4–12: students learn through e-learning modules, stories, and assessment tools covering reading, writing, and listening, with machine-learning guidance on writing assignments. Teachers prepare lessons, track progress, and run per-student interventions off deep data analytics — all curriculum-aligned, in and out of the classroom.
Pain points
The dullest materials attached to students’ weakest subject, teachers burning evenings creating custom Arabic worksheets, and zero data on who was actually falling behind.
Business model
Subscriptions sold directly to schools — a B2B SaaS model where the company invests heavily in its own sales and marketing department for acquisition, onboarding, and expansion inside existing school accounts.
Challenges
Adoption is the classic edtech grind — teachers must change daily habits — compounded by selling to schools during Lebanon’s financial crisis and then scaling one product across many national curricula and buying cycles.
Funding
- Raised: $1.5M Series A (Nov 2018) from Beirut-based Phoenician Funds and iSME — the $30M government/World Bank-backed initiative, already a returning investor — plus angel Tarek Jallad (MENAbytes).
- Scale-up: by April 2022 the Series A had carried Kamkalima to 100+ schools in 6 countries with 50,000+ students and 1,000+ teachers, triggering a commercial-transformation engagement with consultancy HEED to build a scalable sales arm (Consultancy-ME).
Latest — Jan 2025
On 15 January 2025 StartMashreq profiled Kamkalima as a women-led edtech thriving through Lebanon’s economic crisis: from its 2016 founding by two educators with no business background, the platform had reached over 128,000 learners across 11 countries, with founders crediting persistence through the financial crisis and slow school adoption curves (StartMashreq).