Out-Class sells O Level crash courses at Rs6,000, and its own numbers do not yet line up

Out-Class is a Lahore edtech company that sells pre recorded exam courses to Pakistani students who would otherwise pay a tuition academy. It has raised one round of up to $500,000, employs about nine people, and says on its website that it has more than 250 partner schools. Almost everything else it says about itself is a claim without a baseline. This profile separates what is on the record from what is marketing, and shows what the one published price implies.

Three founders and a crash course

Out-Class was founded in 2020 by Aiman Bashir, Oosman Bashir and Ali Nomani, who left well paid jobs to start it. Aiman Bashir is chief executive. She holds an MBA from LUMS and a bachelor's degree from Kinnaird College, according to the company's About Us page. Oosman Bashir teaches the O Level mathematics course discussed below.

The product was narrow on purpose. At launch in 2021 the company offered 13 courses covering the O Level and SAT syllabus, with concept explanations, solved past papers, exam tips and more than 1,000 quizzes, and live teacher sessions before final exams. Students paid a single fee for a full year of access. The company said its teachers came from leading Pakistani schools and from universities abroad.

The pitch is to replace a classroom with a fixed set of video lessons and practice material that a student can finish at home. The About Us page says a crash course typically covers the full syllabus in about 25 hours. Aiman Bashir told LUMS in 2022 that the stepping stone for the company had been Pakistan's test prep market.

What the price list shows

The company's website now covers O Level and IGCSE, SAT, MDCAT, ECAT, FUNGAT, and Federal Board Matric and FSc. Prices are published course by course and not on a main pricing page. The one course page where a price could be read, O Level Mathematics 4024, lists Rs6,000, described as the full course price, with 170 video lessons and a 40 hour crash course.

Two sums follow from those numbers. If the 40 hours are part of the 170 lessons, Rs6,000 across 40 hours is Rs150 for each hour of video, and each lesson runs about 14 minutes, which fits the bite sized format the company describes. The page does not say whether the crash course and the lessons overlap, so both sums hold only if they do. A student taking five subjects at the same price would pay Rs30,000, though only the mathematics price could be confirmed.

There are two loose ends in the company's own account. The page labels Rs6,000 as the full course price per month, while the 2021 launch offer was one fee for a year of access, so it is not clear whether the price is recurring or one off. And the crash course is 40 hours on the product page against about 25 hours on the About Us page. Either could be a typical figure and the other a specific course, but the site does not say so.

The business case is nonetheless easy to describe. The price is a cost to the student; the cost to Out-Class is mostly the one time making of the lessons, plus support staff and marketing. A recorded course costs the same to deliver to ten students as to ten thousand, which is the point of the model, and the reason the question that matters is how many students pay. That number has not been published. The second number to ask for is repeat purchase: a student who buys a second course at the same price doubles that student's revenue without any extra cost of acquisition.

Numbers that do not line up

In June 2022 LUMS reported that the company supported more than 10,000 students. Its website today says 70,000 or more students, or grades, depending on the page, earned As and A stars with it. One page says students, the other grades, which are different units: one student can earn several A grades in a sitting. The site also claims a 94 percent success rate, a 4.95 out of 5 user rating, and more than 250 partner schools, and shows the logos of Lahore Grammar School, The City School, Army Public Schools, Beaconhouse, Karachi Grammar School, Aitchison College and others.

None of these claims comes with a definition. A success rate could mean passing, scoring an A, or finishing a course. Without a denominator the 70,000 figure cannot be set against the 10,000 students counted in 2022, and the school logos do not say whether a school pays, recommends the courses or merely has students who use them. The quiz bank has grown in the same way: more than 1,000 quizzes at launch, more than 10,000 on the website now. A 4.95 out of 5 rating means little without the number of ratings behind it, and a 94 percent success rate means little without the number of students it covers. Taken at face value, 70,000 against 10,000 is a sevenfold rise in about four and a half years, or roughly 55 percent a year, but that holds only if both figures count the same thing, and the company has not said they do.

Revenue is the missing number. The company has not published it, some content is free, and students may buy several courses or none, so no figure for sales can be built from the published price and the student counts.

A small seed round, and a leaner company

The seed round was announced in June 2022. It was led by the House of Habib, with other institutional and angel investors, and was capped at $500,000 with room left for more investors. The founders had started the company with their own savings, and said they wanted to keep the operation lean. Tracxn lists the round as the only one on record, with House of Habib as an investor, and counts nine employees in August 2026.

For scale, Pakistan's Maqsad, a better known edtech company, said in March 2023 that it had raised a $2.8 million seed round that took its total to $4.9 million. Out-Class has raised up to $500,000, about a tenth of that total. Recorded lessons, made once, need fewer people than live tutoring, which may explain part of the gap. It also means growth depends on selling rather than on teaching capacity.

The company says it won two awards in 2021, the Pakistan rounds of the She Loves Tech Global Competition and the Standard Chartered Women in Tech programme. Its site also carries a distributors dashboard, though it gives no terms.

What comes next

In 2021 the company said it planned diagnostic tests, college admission guidance and coding courses in regional languages. The June 2022 funding announcement spoke of expanding the course catalogue and of reaching schools in remote areas, including the outskirts of Quetta and Mardan. The current course list has grown to cover medical and engineering entry tests and Federal Board classes, but a diagnostic test, admissions guidance or regional language coding courses are not on its site.

The next test is whether Out-Class publishes a figure that can be checked. A count of paying students, a definition of its 94 percent success rate and the price of each course would let a reader measure the company against the claims on its own website. The company's last announced funding round was in June 2022, more than four years ago.