Nigerian startup Qataloog makes it easy for universities and colleges to order specialised academic books, enabling catalogue discovery, sharing, strategic acquisition and management of learning content collections for schools in Africa.
Founded in 2019, Qataloog aims to provide the latest findings from the best publishers, authors and aggregators in Africa, Europe, America and Asia-Pacific to schools in Africa through catalogue analytics.
“Qataloog disintermediates the learning content supply chain by offering the industry’s most transparent and cost-effective pricing directly to schools using cataloguing algorithms to autonomously understand semantics learning content and user search preferences to unlock the latest learning content for each user,” said Martins Fidelis, CEO of Qataloog.
“Higher education learning content market is highly fragmented, and there is no easy way for universities and colleges to find the best content for their academic programmes. It requires long phone calls, several emails and the purchase process sucks. Rising cost due to markups by middlemen makes content prices unaffordable to students and libraries. On the flip side, publishers are seeking seamless ways of distributing their learning content across schools directly, without customer acquisition cost.”
This is where Qataloog comes in, with the company focusing on higher education learning content, providing a distribution engine for accessing print and digital books, journals, e-databases and multimedia databases seamlessly.
“Unlike our competitors, content on Qataloog is cost-effective. Users save over 60 per cent of learning content cost. Libraries can seamlessly access and order specialised content from the best publishers around the world in a few clicks. It is very convenient to purchase content from anywhere, our distribution engine is efficient, reliable and pocket-friendly,” Fidelis said.
The startup, which has has so far secured US$150,000 angel investment as well as funding via the ASIP accelerator run by Startupbootcamp AfriTech, already has 35 universities and colleges as paying customers, to which it has distributed more than 10,000 books from over 2,800 onboarded academic publishers. It operates in Nigeria for now, but plans to expand to South Africa, Senegal, and then to the United States (US).
