In a pre-seed round led by Dubai-based COTU Ventures and New York-based Colle Capital, UAE-based edtech platform and remote work marketplace Qureos has raised $3 million. The round also saw the participation of other investors namely Globivest, AlZayani Venture Capital, Dubai Angel Investors and Plutus21 Capital. It saw participation from angel investors, all current and former executives from companies such as QIA, ADNOC, Swvl, Boston Consulting Group, Careem, Cisco Syatems, Moelis & Company, Koinz, Message Bird, Bain & Company, and Hiperpool.
Thanks to the new funding, Qureos will be executing plans aimed at growing its platform. The company wants to grow the uptake of its platform by at least 10 times before the year comes to an end as well as create 100 million jobs over the next few years.
Qureos, which sounds like “curious” when pronounced, is an edtech and remote work marketplace providing people with the opportunity to improve their skills and get jobs. The platform was founded by Alexander Epure, Mehrad Yaghmai and Usama Nini in August 2021 with the aim of widening access to people looking to either begin or change careers. The platform also allows these people to pick up new skills or improve old ones and its learning services are provided by industry experts referred to as mentors.
What Qureos does is match mentors to relevant trainees. This way trainees can learn new skills and it doesn’t matter if they have knowledge or experience in that field at all. Qureos caters to all of these. According to the platform’s CEO, Alexander Epure, “The experience that we have at Qureos is about learning from others and from industry experts, and through project-based learning or case study solutions.” According to him, learning on the platform is a shift from self-paced massive open online courses (MOOC), which according to him are most times hard to scale because they require constant updating.
He added that on the platform, trainees get practical tasks assigned to them on behalf of client companies, “everyone submits their work, gets feedback, a rating and reflection from the mentors. As such, you learn from peers and from the best in the world.”
The platform says it has attracted more than 25,000 trainees, 200 mentors from big tech companies and 300 business partners which use its platform to offer remote work to people. Qureos says its user base cuts across 133 countries and about 32 percent of its user base are Africans – with most of its African population residing in South Africa and countries in the North African region.
Trainees have to pay a fee to be on the platform while companies, on the other hand, pay a subscription based on the type and frequency of job postings. Qureos says it is creating both learning and work opportunities for underemployed and unemployed people while helping companies cut down costs and time spent in hiring talents at the same time.
Qureos will also use the funding for driving awareness of its platform. “We have a global footprint today and to sustain it moving forward we are building a team to help us with our growth plans, and this includes building different forms of awareness marketing. We also have an aggressive plan to strengthen our technology and product. The vision is to create an ecosystem that has a validated and unique way of learning that also ensures that trainees have access to world-class mentors,” its CEO said.
“We see tremendous opportunity in Qureos’ mission to bridge knowledge gaps and upskill professionals through leveraging the extraordinary pathway with direct mentorship. Simultaneously, this platform provides a fantastic opportunity for highly-skilled individuals to directly monetize their knowledge, compounded by distinct network effects, and for companies to access high-quality and motivated pools of talent,” Colle Capital founder and managing partner Victoria Grace said.
