Yahya Bouhlel began coding in his early teenagers. Inside this timeline, he interned at a number of firms in Palo Alto, California. Most of his work revolved round constructing apps and iPhone video games.
When he got here dwelling to Tunis, he met many college students who needed to construct merchandise like him every summer season. And it was one such summer season in 2017 that he had the idea of GOMYCODE.
After finishing his research in France and dealing a 12 months for Amazon in London, Amine Bouhlel, Yahya’s older sibling, moved again to Tunisia. His new job was to open a subsidiary for a French open supply tech startup and that required hiring builders on the bottom. Nonetheless, discovering a large quantity in Tunis was robust.
“At the moment, I had simply graduated from highschool and I had a free summer season. Amine was struggling to seek out larger net builders,” CEO Yahya Bouhlel instructed TechCrunch in an interview. “So the concept of constructing a faculty or a studying expertise with the spirit of Silicon Valley got here, and we began GOMYCODE as a summer season mission and camp and grew that 12 months.” Amine, the corporate’s chief working officer, held the title of CCO for Jumia Tunisia from 2018 to 2021.
The edtech, launched in 2017, is asserting immediately that it has closed an $8 million Collection A spherical. It’s the biggest spherical at this stage on the continent (barring Andela if it’s not counted as an edtech). AfricInvest, by way of its Cathay AfricInvest Innovation Fund (CAIF) and French-based growth finance establishment Proparco, co-led the early-growth spherical.
This brings GOMYCODE’s complete financing to $8.85 million. It raised $850,000 seed in October 2020. Considered one of its traders from the seed spherical, Wamda Capital, doubled down on this new financing.
Along with Tunisia, GOMYCODE is current in Bahrain, Morocco, Egypt, Algeria, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Nigeria. The startup hopes that the Collection A funding will drive its presence in 12 international locations, together with South Africa, Kenya, Ghana and Saudi Arabia. It additionally plans to deepen its presence within the international locations already current, particularly Egypt and Nigeria.
By 2030, it’s predicted that the variety of youths — folks between the ages of 15 and 24 — in Africa will enhance by 42%, according to the UN. One of the crucial urgent challenges the continent presently faces — and can nonetheless meet — is upskilling these folks in a area the place some international locations have unemployment charges reaching 30%.
Whereas there are numerous jobs in each side of life, tech jobs are presently in excessive demand within the international financial system nowadays. As such, most venture-backed startups construct round upskilling college students and professionals in software program engineering and customarily tech-facing abilities. In Africa, a number of of them embrace unicorn Andela, AltSchool, Gebeya, Decagon, Semicolon and others. They function online-only or hybrid fashions (a mixture of offline and on-line settings).
GOMYCODE makes use of the latter. It presents over 30 studying tracks starting from net growth to digital advertising and marketing and information science to synthetic intelligence. College students are required to spend 50% of their time studying on-line and the opposite half at one among GOMYCODE’s community of 20 bodily facilities. Bouhlel says the corporate has native lecturers in each nation — over 500 in quantity — they usually train college students in over 12 languages.
“We’re addressing a requirement that nearly no different firm is capturing at our scale,” stated the chief government. “Native conventional coaching facilities provide outdated content material and methodology, and worldwide on-line gamers battle to enroll African college students as a consequence of their lack of expertise of native markets and unaffordable value factors. We’ve got a blended training mannequin, we train in twelve native languages, and we’re positioning ourselves as a regional chief.”
