Edtech Maqsad raises $2.8m in seed round.

Maqsad, an edtech platform for academic content, has raised a seed round of $2.8 million at an undisclosed valuation, co-founder Rooshan Aziz told Dawn in an interview on Wednesday.

The latest funding takes the startup's all-time capital raised to $4.9m as it conducted a pre-seed round of $2.1m a year-and-a-half ago.

A company statement said the round was led by Speedinvest and returning investor Indus Valley Capital. Other participants included Stellar Capital, Alter Global, Johann Jenson (SVP Product at GoStudent) and other strategic angels.

Incoming investor Speedinvest is one of Europe's largest seed funds and already has an edtech unicorn in its portfolio, Vienna-based GoStudent.

Founded in 2021 by Aziz and Taha Ahmed, Maqsad aims to make education accessible for 100m Pakistani students via an end-to-end learning mobile platform that provides teaching, testing and query resolution for grades 9 to 12.

In the last six months, the Maqsad app has been downloaded over a million times, answered 4m student queries and has consistently ranked as the top education app in Pakistan on the Google Play Store, the company claimed.

Pakistan has one of the highest student-teacher ratios in the world, with only one teacher for every 44 students.

The expected annual education spend is $37 billion by 2032, Aziz said, adding that a quarter of this goes towards after-school academic support that is often expensive and difficult to access - a problem that Maqsad is...