Sarmayacar Ventures backs daring entrepreneurs who are building scalable, market-transforming enterprise and consumer technology businesses in Pakistan. Being the first venture investor, they have invested as little as $100K at the Seed stage and up to $2MM at the Series A stage. Saramayacar strives to add value beyond capital, and have a strong commitment to help their portfolio companies grow their business. They believe in becoming reliable and supportive partners, and seek to play to the strengths of the founders the company backs. These people are not daunted by typical challenges of building a successful venture, and enjoy working side-by-side with passionate founders to find solutions using technology.
Dot and Line, an edtech start-up that developed a powerful after-school mathematics program, has raised six figure dollar funding in its Seed Round.
The learning program has been built by Math subject specialists from leading universities, experienced teachers from top schools, PhDs and educationalists. The program is taught after-school through a home-based network of highly trained and certified teachers spread across Karachi and Lahore. The progress of each child and performance of each centre is monitored through cutting edge technology, maintaining complete transparency. Through their 50 active centres Dot & Line has already impacted hundreds of children and claim a 40% improvement in grades within 4 months of the program.
The Math program is built for grades 2 through to 7, whereas the English program launching in August 2019 targets 4 to 10 year olds and ensures strong reading fluency, comprehension, writing and vocabulary development. Classes are held in small batches at a certified Dot and Line teacher’s home and also cover exam prep and homework help, making it a one stop holistic solution for each child with a direct positive impact on school grades.
Co-Founder Lina Ahmed believes,
“Children have immense potential, the next world renowned scientist, engineer, inventor and leader are amongst us and our mission is to equip them with quality learning experiences to unleash that talent nationwide. With our Math program showing strong results, we are now excited to launch English.”
On the other hand Maheen Adamjee, Co-Founder of Dot and Line remarked,
“We aim to bridge the gap in quality education across the country because we believe every child can achieve their maximum potential given the right resources and teacher. Dot and Line will change the future of an entire generation. ”
The seed round is led by one of the country’s most notable VC investors, Sarmayacar. Dr. Bernhard Klemen, Partner at Sarmayacar, former VP at JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley, and a successful serial entrepreneur will join the board of Dot and Line. Bernhard mentiones, “Dot & Line offers a high-quality curriculum in the attractive and sizeable education space; we at Sarmayacar are convinced that the team headed by two exceptional female founders and supported by us will scale across Pakistan for supporting and fostering the young talent of the country”. The investment round also includes Silicon Valley based private investor and technology industry veteran Hasan Rizvi, former Executive Vice President of Oracle in California. Dot & Line will use the funding to add English literacy to their product offering, achieve further excellence in product development and target significant growth within Karachi and Lahore.