Nigeria’s AltSchool Africa raises $1m in pre-seed funding round

AltSchool Africa announced that it has secured $1 million in a pre-seed funding round to scale its efforts. Investors include Olugbenga “GB” Agboola, Flutterwave co-founder and CEO; Shola Akinlade, Paystack co-founder and CEO; Folarin Falana, a Nigerian artist popularly known as Falzthebahdguy; and Akitoye Balogun, a Nigerian artist known as Ajebutter22. The VCs in the round include Voltron Capital, Nestcoin, Pledges and Odba VC.

Launched as a separate initiative by TalentQL in October 2021, AltSchool Africa is an online program where individuals, starting from secondary school graduates, looking to build a career in tech, can earn a top-rated diploma in software engineering within a year. AltSchool Africa partners with higher institutions to provide diploma certificates for the programs.

AltSchool Africa is structured around a comprehensive curriculum designed to impart the knowledge required to gain employment as a qualified software engineer without the rigours of a traditional four-year undergraduate degree programme. Students can take advantage of a flexible study schedule to complete all the modules while attending to their existing professional and personal commitments.

Designed to be beginner-friendly for students, the program is open to candidates with no prior knowledge or experience in Software Engineering. For easy specialisation, the AltSchool Africa program is divided into 3 certification tracks; Front-End Engineering, Back-End Engineering, and Cloud Engineering. Participants can specialize after the first couple of months of intensive training learning about the basics of Software Engineering.

AltSchool intends to use the funds to build its content and curriculum, technology infrastructure and community concept.

According to CEO Adewale Yusf, more than 8,000 people have applied to participate in AltSchool’s software engineering program, which commences in April. These applications are from 19 countries (including 14 African countries) with most entries from Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, Kenya and Botswana. 

Other startups that are involved in equipping people with the right software engineering education include Decagon, whose approach is to train and develop world-class software developers in just six months and assist in ensuring the graduates gets jobs upon gradation.