Taleemabad sold to 300 private schools, then found its real customer: the state

For about two years, Taleemabad sold its learning programme to low fee private schools in Pakistan, one school at a time. The team reached roughly 300 of them, then concluded it had picked the wrong customers. Taleemabad, an Islamabad edtech organisation that makes animated lessons, AI generated lesson plans and teacher coaching, now depends mainly on government payments, its chief executive Haroon Yasin told Rippleworks in March 2025.

From an evening school to prime time television

Yasin began teaching about 14 years before that interview, in the slums of Islamabad, where he started an evening school for children who worked during the day. The team later turned classroom lessons into animated cartoons, he said. The first videos went on YouTube and each passed a million views. The national public broadcaster then asked to air them in prime time children's slots, and Yasin put the audience at about 8.5 million children a week. In a 2023 article he wrote himself, the same figure appeared as 8.5 million monthly watchers, so the cadence is unsettled. The mobile app reached about 1.5 million downloads.

The organisation is hard to file. Its website says it is powered by Orenda Welfare Trust, and the Mulago Foundation lists it as a nonprofit. It also has a seed round: Yasin, who describes himself as cofounder and chief executive, wrote in September 2023 that Taleemabad raised $2.3 million from funders including Malala Fund, Sorenson and Mudassir Sheikha, the chief executive of Careem. That account is self published. Tracxn names Nauman Bukhari as cofounder and CTO and Sabeena Abbasi as cofounder and chief digital learning officer.

The wrong market and the pivot to government

The private schools Taleemabad first targeted charged about $3 to $4 a month and taught 100 to 200 children each. Of the early strategy Yasin told Rippleworks that "we sold our product to the wrong market." The team's conclusion was that it needed to work at the scale of whole districts rather than single schools.

So it changed customers. Yasin described Taleemabad as "taking over entire districts of public schools in partnership with the government." He cautioned that this has limits: "the government was not a monolithic entity," he said, and he cited four governments in three years as a hazard.

The money is modest and uneven, and Yasin's figures were illustrative. Government payments might be "let's say $2 million" a year, he said, with a hope of $4 million and then perhaps $10 million as programmes grow. But governments fund programmes and deployments, he said, not the building of the product or fixed costs. Grants come from only two recurring long term funders, giving $100,000 and $200,000 a year. He offered one example of leverage: a pilot of about $20,000, funded by AI for Education, led the government to spend about half a million dollars on printing and distributing textbooks.

Islamabad's 341 schools and a test of AI lesson plans

The largest public programme is NIETE, the National Institute of Excellence in Teacher Education programme. ProPakistani reported its launch in December 2023 across 342 Islamabad government schools and about 4,000 teachers, with Taleemabad leading development and rollout. EdTech Hub, evaluating it in June 2025, described 341 schools, 4,044 primary teachers and about 98,000 students, with three parts: digital training, AI generated lesson plans aligned to the national curriculum, and classroom coaching.

The evaluation, funded through GSMA's innovation fund with UK government money, is more candid than most vendor claims. Teachers were not told that the lesson plans were AI generated. Of 160 teachers surveyed, 62.5 percent said they used the plans daily. Platform data told a patchier story: 3,423 teachers had opened at least three plans, but many struggled to stay on schedule, and experienced teachers found the scripted lessons restrictive. EdTech Hub's summary of the evaluation says "teacher agency matters," and that without room for professional judgment even good resources risk going unused.

Taleemabad points to learning outcomes as well. On its own impact page it says Urdu reading at grade level in Islamabad schools rose from 35 percent to 56 percent, and reports learning gains of 0.28 standard deviations, a figure the Mulago Foundation also cites. In Balochistan, a trial with the World Bank's DIME unit covering 1,230 students found a gain of 0.23 standard deviations in Urdu sentence reading, though the company's own page marks the maths results as weaker. These are company reported, and several underlying reports are listed as internal.

Punjab, and a bill of three dollars a child

The largest claim concerns Punjab, Pakistan's most populous province. The company says the provincial education ministry has committed to deploying Taleemabad in 6,000 schools. The same page shows 479 schools on its dashboard as of 5 February 2026, with Moawin Foundation supporting 179 of them and Akhuwat Foundation 300, so the commitment is far ahead of delivery.

A study in Rawalpindi, launched in April 2026, covers 261 schools and about 37,000 students, and the company says the programme costs $3 per child per year. For public budgets stretched thin, that price is the pitch. The company also runs Rumi, an AI coach that works through WhatsApp and which it says had 1,870 teachers on it.

The risks are plain. Yasin told Rippleworks that Taleemabad was running up against a glass ceiling in the grant capital available to social enterprises in Pakistan, and that large language models are really bad at Urdu, the language teachers use. Mulago, which last updated its profile in September 2025, says the evidence needs to catch up with growth. Taleemabad has built a company out of a bet that a government will pay for better teaching at three dollars a child. Whether the evidence, and the budget, hold across 6,000 schools is the test now.

Reported from the company's statements and impact page, and coverage and evaluations by Rippleworks, EdTech Hub, ProPakistani, Data Darbar, the Mulago Foundation and Tracxn.