Shikho, an edtech startup focused on grades such as 9,10,11, and 12, now hopes to provide content from 6th grade to university level. This comes after the closing of a $ 1.3 million round led by its earliest investors LearnStart, a firm that seeded funds into the Study Capital agency and Anchorless Bangladesh.

Wavemaker Partners and Ankur Nagpal, the founder and CEO of online training platform Teachable, also participated in the round. Shikho's most recent round of funding was a $275,000 pre-seed round from LearnStart and strategic angel investors last year.

Shikho was established in 2019 by Shahir Chowdhury, CEO and COO Zeeshan Zakaria and its instructional materials are based on the Bangladeshi National Curriculum and were crafted by educators and topic specialists. The edtech platform uses gamification techniques such as points, leaderboards, and virtual awards to keep students involved.

A little about the edtech platform’s CEO, Chowdhury, first sprung out working in the finance and business domain before he took the role as mathematician.

It’s believed that Chowdhury was initially interested in fintech due to his previous work experience, but soon found that there were already a number of firms focused on financial inclusion in Bangladesh, such as bKash. Chowdhury's father is a retired professor, and his mother is still a high school teacher, thus he began to think about education. He then worked on a client study about the growth of Indian and Chinese edtech businesses, such as Byju's and Toppr, by chance.

Chowdhury approached Zakaria about taking over Shikho's academic programming. Shikho's purpose is to find more interesting and effective ways to deliver Bangladesh National Curriculum information to students.

Its Chief Operating Officer, Zeeshan Zakaria, spent his career years in finance as well, before stepping in as mathematician of the edtech platform.

“In terms of the syllabus, not much has changed since my father was in grade 10, Zakaria added. I'm not a politician, so I can't make changes there, but I can influence how they're delivered. In terms of pedagogical experience, we present the curriculum in a way that has never been seen before”.

Both were born and raised in Dhaka before coming to the UK to attend university. Chowdhury told TechCrunch that he wanted to start a socially beneficial firm in Bangladesh even while working in finance.

Since, students in Bangladesh could seldom have any access to after school learning centres or tuitions, as most of these centres or locations were housed in major cities. It was this reason that provoked the start of Shikho, which not only provides supplementary education more accessible, but affordable as well.

“I tried to figure out what edtech was and why it was succeeding in other markets but not in Bangladesh. When I viewed it closely, I saw no reason why it couldn't exist in Bangladesh. From a macroeconomic standpoint, you have everything you need. You have a population of roughly 165 million individuals, half of whom are under the age of 25”, Chowdhury explained.