Knowledge Platform's customers are its shareholder, a telecom sponsor and the state
The edtech company, with offices in Singapore and Pakistan, has reached classrooms through a school chain that owns part of it, a mobile operator's sponsored programme, federal contracts and a UNDP grant. The prices behind these deals are not public.
Beaconhouse School System put money into Knowledge Platform in September 2019. A year later it signed a three year contract to put the company's software in 200 of its schools. That overlap sits at the centre of the company's customer list, which also includes a telecom sponsor that backed a public schools programme and, since 2021, federal education authorities. None of these buyers has said what it pays, so the numbers that are public describe reach, not revenue.
A shareholder that is also a customer
On 2 October 2019 the company announced an oversubscribed Series A of more than $2 million. Beaconhouse and Lakson Investments Venture Capital led it, each taking a minority stake, and Future Trust, set up by the JS Group, provided a funding facility outside the round. The company said then that its products served over 200,000 students in over 350 public and private schools, and that its Learn Smart Pakistan platform was free for students.
On 27 October 2020 the relationship widened. Knowledge Platform agreed to supply a customised learning management system, a library of lessons, integration with Google's content applications and a community platform for teachers to the Beaconhouse system: more than 100,000 students in 200 schools, in Pakistan and seven other countries. The company's own account of its contracts puts the term at three years and counts 7,000 teachers.
“This is the third stage of our 14 month relationship with Knowledge Platform.”
Kasuri described the earlier stages as the investment, then a national curriculum platform for Beaconhouse's Educators partner network, which was extended to Beaconhouse schools during the pandemic. The size of Beaconhouse's stake and the contract's value have not been published. The magazine's reading is that an owner buying from the company it owns is a common arrangement in a young company, but the contract cannot be taken as a test of what an independent school chain would pay.
A sponsor behind the schools
The public school work followed a different pattern. Between January 2018 and January 2020, Jazz Smart Schools put blended learning into 75 public girls' schools in Islamabad. Jazz was the sponsor, Knowledge Platform ran the programme and the Federal Directorate of Education was the implementing partner. The company counts more than 38,000 girls and 1,000 teachers and principals among the participants.
In October 2020 the Directorate collected feedback from 51 principals, 143 teachers and 533 students. Of those surveyed, 95 percent said the programme improved learning, teaching quality and school culture. That is 727 respondents. The 533 students are about 1.4 percent of 38,000, so the survey speaks for a small share of the girls involved. A separate study of 15 schools, a fifth of the 75, found that board examination results rose 10 percent against those schools' own average for the previous three years.
Both results are useful and neither shows cause. A survey of people who used a programme measures how it was received. A rise against a school's own past average has no comparison group, so it cannot separate the software from teacher training, other changes in the school or a cohort that was already improving.
The state as buyer
In April 2021 Knowledge Platform won, through competitive bidding, the federal government's first public sector blended learning project for middle schools. It covered 80 classrooms in federal government schools in Islamabad, grades 6 to 8, over three years, and was expected to reach more than 28,000 students. The package included an offline learning system that works without internet in the classroom, an AI enabled cloud system synchronised with it, content in mathematics, science and English, teacher training, and analytics for school heads. Federal Education Minister Shafqat Mahmood attended the signing.
The arithmetic is simple. Spread over 80 classrooms, 28,000 students is 350 per classroom across the term, or about 117 a year. That is more than one class section a room, so each room is meant to be shared. The project's three year term covered separate pilots for primary, middle and secondary grades, and Knowledge Platform was chosen for the middle grades only.
On 26 August 2022 the Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Training signed three contracts with a consortium led by Knowledge Platform. Its other members are Orenda, which makes Taleemabad, SABAQ, Learning Pitch and NearPeer. The consortium licenses content from early childhood through school to the government, to be delivered by Tele School and digital channels, and the ministry projects benefits for more than 50 million students. The contract values were not disclosed. Tele School, the television channel carrying the content, reached over 7 million students during the pandemic.
A month after the Beaconhouse deal, in November 2020, the company announced a partnership with the Aga Khan University Examination Board to launch a cloud based learning platform for affiliated schools across Pakistan. As with the others, no terms were published.
Learners, not students
The company's own counts now use different units from the ones it used in 2019. Its website reports more than 3 million learners across schools, universities and organisations, of whom over 1.3 million have played its games, and more than 400 education, corporate and government clients. If the game players sit inside the 3 million, as the wording suggests, they are about 43 percent of it. A learner who has played a game once is not a student whose daily class runs on the system, so the learner count says little about classroom use.
The offer reaches beyond schools. The site lists more than 1,600 online courses, including banking and corporate training with over 1,200 courses and an Islamic finance suite it says is certified by the State Bank of Pakistan. A business that sells licences to a few large institutions depends on each renewal, so one lost contract would show quickly in revenue.
A fourth kind of payer appeared in June 2024. Knowledge Platform was one of four winners at an innovative financing challenge at IBA Karachi, run with UNDP Pakistan and JS Bank, and received a Rs10 million grant to expand its environmental education games.
