The struggles of trying to find the right tutors and babysitters for our children can be a nightmare. Luckily, Orcas has made it easy to find the perfect match. In a pre-series A investment round led by Algebra Ventures and joined by NFX Ventures, Orcas received half a million dollars to expand and grow their services.
Orcas, a Cairo-based online marketplace for babysitters and tutors has previously raised $150,000 from Khaled Ismail, Kamelizer, and Cairo Angels.
Founded in 2013, the Orcas co-founders Omar Fayez, Amira El Gharib, Hossam Taher, and Ahmed Ismail, used to distribute a simple booklet among parents who were their target customers, due to the fact that the four had only pooled in $1,000 to start their business. The booklet was created after Orcas had registered a decent number of babysitters and tutors to work with them. A year later in 2014, Orcas used a Facebook page as their only source to acquire customers. The startup raised its first external funding round that same year, but continued with their Facebook page instead of building a technology platform.
In addition to closing their funding round, Orcas launched their newest feature this past summer, called ‘Discoveries’ that allows children to learn a variety of different topics, in addition to expanding their horizons whilst they explore a range of exciting activities.
“Our students, parents, and partners are our primary focus. We will use this investment to develop our product offering and scale our operational capacity with the end goal of optimizing user experience for all our stakeholders.”
Amira El Gharib, Co-founder & Chief Growth Officer, Orcas
Ahmed Elkalla, a Managing Partner at NFX Capital, said, “Orcas and other tech-enabled tutoring platforms are delivering today on what academic research promised more than 20 years ago. Students who are tutored one-to-one perform significantly better than students who learn via conventional instructional methods. This used to be a luxury very few people could afford but now through tech-enabled platforms like Orcas a much wider group of students can reap the personalized tutoring benefits.”
Commenting on the investment, Amira El Gharib, Co-founder and Chief Growth Officer at Orcas said, “Our students, parents, and partners are our primary focus. We will use this investment to develop our product offering and scale our operational capacity with the end goal of optimizing user experience for all our stakeholders.”After announcing the investment through, Taher in a Facebook post said, “This investment is a great push towards us becoming the biggest mobile application providing tutors, babysitters and educational learning experiences to all parents in Egypt and the region.”
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