Daily Times

Karachi-based ed-tech startup Dot & Line has successfully closed its seed round with an additional investment from London-based entrepreneur Zeeshan Shah.

Zeeshan is an award winning entrepreneur focused on the real estate with projects in excess of $500 million under development and interests in the US, UK, Dubai and Pakistan. The seed round was led by Pakistan’s leading VC fund Sarmayacar and Silicon Valley-based private investor and technology industry veteran Hasan Rizvi, former executive vice president of Oracle in California, according to a press release issued by the organistaion.

Founded in 2015 by two LSE (London School of Economics) alums – Maheen Adamjee and Lina Ahmed – Dot & Line is a tech-based network of female tutors which delivers after-school classes in mathematics and English from their own homes. With the cutting-edge technology and a quality curriculum built by subject specialists including PhDs from leading universities and top schools, the Dot & Line’s tutors are able to show a 40% increase in student learning outcomes within four months, while earning Rs 24,000 to Rs 72,000 every month by delivering the program without leaving their home.

Since their seed round in June 2019, the Dot & Line has expanded its offering by launching an English program to complement its flagship math program. The program has been a roaring success and has added to Dot & Line’s growth momentum by increasing monthly registrations by over 4x in just two months.

Moreover, they have built a robust and scalable tech-enabled teacher recruitment process that can be used to recruit and train women anywhere in the country to become Dot & Line Teacher Partners. With it, Dot & Line has grown its network of teaching centres to 200 locations, spanning major cities across Pakistan and successfully matching parents with trained and certified teachers located just five minutes away.

“We strive for nothing less than excellence regarding the quality of our content and teachers. It is our belief as a company that there is no reason a child should be struggling academically if these two core components are provided and by leveraging technology we are able to make a much stronger nation-wide impact,”, Co-Founder of Dot & Line Lina Ahmed said.

COO Fariha Yousufi said the company’s approach towards growth has been two-fold. “We constantly turn to data collected from our customers, teacher partners, experts in the field and our target market to look for opportunities to pave and fuel our way forward. Moreover, as an ed-tech company, we are deeply committed to using technology to solve for problems and build systems across the board, from customer acquisition and service delivery to recruitment and training of teacher partners,” he added.