Nigerian startup Simbi has launched an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot that uses interactive tools to help students learn and evaluate themselves.
The multi-subject SimbiBot aims to make learning fun, personalised and convenient, and does this using an interactive question and answer format.
Co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) AbdulAzeez Ogunjobi told Disrupt Africa even those African children that were lucky enough to attend school were not learning as they should be, due to large class sizes, non-stimulating learning methods, and a lack of modern, quality content.
The bootstrapped Simbi is looking to tackle this with its bot, which was trialled with 10,000 users between January and March of this year, and made over US$10,000 in revenues off 5,000 paid subscribers. Since its formal launch in mid-April, it has already secured over 1,000 users.
Ogunjobi said Simbi, which has a freemium model but charges a subscription fee for certain premium features, was in talks with the Ogun and Lagos state governments over making SimbiBot accessible to a total of 500,000 students, which would be a huge boost to the startup.
Long-term, it has plans to expand both its geographic reach and the amount of content available on the platform.
“We intend to scale to other parts of Africa, empowering 10,000 teachers and adding value to about 20 million students in the next three years. We also intend to expand our content base from just secondary schools content to life-long learning content,” Ogunjobi said.
