“On a mission to deliver tomorrow’s education today”

Through gamification of content, KooBits is transforming education and taking it beyond the traditional classroom barriers

A million-dollar scholarship and a deep passion for education — these were the two key aspects that fuelled the creation of KooBits, a Singapore-based edtech startup that is transforming education beyond the traditional classroom barriers. The journey of KooBits started as an interactive e-book platform and has grown to be a multinational community-based learning company. The startup currently serves over 361 schools across Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines — making it one of the most popular edtech platforms of Southeast Asia, garnering some of the highest traffic in its product category. 

Using gamification and community learning, KooBits has been making learning fun for its 200,000 and growing monthly users. Stanley Han, the CEO and Founder of KooBits delves into how they are reimagining education. 

The Journey 

Stanley, who received a million-dollar worth of education scholarship in Singapore, is a big believer that good education opportunities can be a gamechanger for any individual and increase social mobility. Through the ups and downs on their road to set up KooBits, he says the team began to understand the core problem in education a lot better, which helped refine their offering. “We didn’t end up with the idea from day one. In the beginning, KooBits was an interactive e-book platform for children to learn writing. We realised that quality delivery is one of the key problems in education, so we began exploring if we could build a platform that is independent of teachers,” he shares. 

The reasoning that led to a shift in KooBits’ approach was this — to teach the 300 million children around the world, there need to be at least 10 million full-time teachers (at a teacher-student ratio of 1:30). “Ensuring every teacher can teach the same quality of education is a challenge. Therefore, we focussed on building a platform that could deliver quality learning to any number of children. We also believe that the platform is not meant to replace teachers but that automating and optimising routine tasks to a platform will help free up a teacher’s time,” adds Stanley. 

Creative thinking to overcome challenges 

Another problem faced by the education industry is with the content: the textbook or the workbook. With the content differing widely across countries, KooBits took a creative route to find a unifying ground. KooBits knew that whether a child is from India, China or the USA, the experience needed to be homogenous. Therefore, they realised that games/gamification of content was the best approach to take, making learning highly user-friendly and fun.

“We originally started by selling our product to schools. After a few months, we started having parents reach out to us to buy the product directly. Eventually, in 2020 we were ready to sell directly to consumers (parents). Within the first nine months, the entire consumer business overtook all the B2B business that we had built in four years,” he recalls.

Scaling up

The team has made it their mission to deliver tomorrow’s education today. They are determined to continue creating engaging content and become the ‘Netflix for education’ in the next three years. KooBits wants to help any child have access to the best-in-class learning by providing them with unlimited access to top-quality global content 24/7, with a local flavour (through regional languages – similar to that of Netflix).

“Having BEENEXT on our journey has helped accelerate the pace of our growth. The entire team understood the emotion behind the decisions that drove me and the business. Through BEECommunity, we were introduced to many wonderful entrepreneurs to connect with, learn from and share knowledge on products, distribution channels, go-to-market strategies, etc. I hope through KooBits, we can offer opportunities of good education to millions of students at scale,” he adds. 

We remain excited for the journey ahead with KooBits as they help millions of children truly enjoy what and how they learn.