These founders built Africa’s ChatGPT – before ChatGPT was out.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!And last year they crossed one million users.
Meet Tao and Dacod. When they started FoondaMate, they didn’t mean to become a startup.
They wanted to fix a problem they experienced growing up – accessing study materials.
Dacod grew up in a rural township in South Africa. He recounts his family only getting electricity in 2003.
In grade 9, Dacod and his brother decided that instead of getting any clothes for the year they would save for a second-hand computer and play video games.
Dacod didn’t know it then, but buying a computer would change the trajectory of his life.
In his final year of high school, Dacod’s class of 70 didn’t have access to textbooks, but Dacod could download study materials online on his computer.
Dacod topped his high school and was the first student from his school to be accepted into the University of Cape Town (Africa’s top university).
But his experiences growing up weren’t lost on him.
His co-founder, Tao, had also been struggling get textbooks into underserved schools in South Africa.
Dacod and Tao realised students dont have textbooks – but they have WhatsApp.
And when WhatsApp opened its API to the public, Foondamate was born.
Using AI, Foondamate can send you study resources based on your subjects.
You just ask Foondamate your study questions on WhatsApp, and it shoots out an answer.
And when they launched their video demo, they had 40,000 users within weeks. Downloads grew across Africa – starting in South Africa. Then Nigeria, then Kenya.
And soon, users popped up in Indonesia, Columbia and India.
By the end of 2022 year they had hit 1 million users with no signs of slowing down.
They have this thing that founders dream of – Product Market Fit.
LocalGlobe partner, Ziv Reichert, who invested in Foondamate’s Seed Round, commented that it takes empathy for users and a deep understanding of a problem to build a product like this.
That’s the beauty of Foondamate’s story.
They obsessed over a very hard problem, and combined two technologies to solve it in the right way – WhatsApp and AI.
And by solving that problem, Dacod and Tao have built a company that Africa and the rest of the world needs and loves.
What do you think of Foondamates story?
