The problem
Across West Africa, classrooms are overcrowded, good teachers are scarce, and school closures can wipe out terms of learning. Parents who can afford it pay for extra lessons of uneven quality; everyone else’s children simply fall behind with no feedback loop to catch up.
How it works
Founded by Sim Shagaya in 2019, uLesson offers a suite of products inside one app: a core curriculum video library, live scheduled lessons, and live personalized homework help for primary and secondary learners. By 2021 the formula was compounding — daily average users surged 430%, live-lesson demand grew 222% after their September introduction, and the app passed two million downloads with 12.3 million videos watched. The group then moved upmarket into higher education with Miva Open University, a distance-learning institution where every student gets a success advisor as mentor, coach, and guide.
Pain points
Shared handsets (roughly half of learners use a parent’s phone), expensive mobile data, and exam seasons with no affordable, curriculum-matched preparation.
Business model
Households pay for uLesson’s K-12 learning plans, while Miva Open University enrols tuition-paying degree students — two divisions, basic and tertiary, under one group.
Challenges
Monetizing low-income households where data itself is a luxury; localizing content across national curricula; and holding attention against free YouTube educators and global edtech giants moving downmarket.
Funding
- Raised: $15M Series B (December 2021) from Nielsen Ventures and Tencent alongside existing investors Owl Ventures, TLcom Capital, and Founder Collective — described at close as the largest disclosed investment in an African edtech startup.
- Valuation: MISSING.
Latest — May 2026
CNN’s Marketplace Africa featured Sim Shagaya on the uLesson Group’s growth: the basic-education division serves primary and secondary pupils across West Africa while Miva Open University serves about 25,000 students across 70 countries, with expansion planned into more African markets including Kenya, where a licence is being pursued.