Indonesia-based Arkademi, an online platform focussing on the learning and teaching of vocational skills, has announced that it has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from US-based VC firm SOSV.
Arkademi will use the fresh funds to enhance its product, hire new talents, and establish its footing in the Indonesian market.
The firm plans to facilitate around 200 more courses and partner with 150 institutions this year, adding to its current numbers of 50 classes by 20 institutions.
Arkademi Founder and CEO Hilman Fajrian also noted that with the funding, SOSV also pledges to support the edutech startup’s growth to serve the country’s 185 million working-age population.
Established in 2018, Arkademi provides various learning topics in an online course format that ranges from digital marketing to entrepreneurship. The platform allows users to upload and share their courses.
President Joko Widodo has set a goal to add 57 million skilled workers by 2030. In order to meet this goal and keep up with industrial growth, Indonesia’s Ministry of Manpower estimated 3.8 million skilled workers are needed to be groomed and empowered annually.
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This goal alone is yet to solve the unemployment rate in Indonesia that currently is at around 5 per cent.
“One of the main sources of this problem is limited community access to vocational education, which stems from inefficient implementations and high costs. This problem is what Arkademi seeks to tackle,” said Fajrin.
In addition to the funding, Arkademi will join SOSV accelerator programme MOX, which focusses on the cross-border mobile internet sector. MOX or Mobile Only Accelerator is a programme focussed on localisation, optimisation, monetisation, and partnerships. MOX is operated by the VC firm SOSV with US$650 million assets under management.
Headquartered in Silicon Valley, SOSV operates six vertically-focussed accelerator programmes: MOX for mobile internet (Taipei), IndieBio, and RebelBio for biotech (San Francisco, London), HAX for hardware (Shenzhen, San Francisco), Chinaccelerator for internet and software (Shanghai), and Food-X for foodtech and agritech (NYC).
Arkademi was previously part of AWS Edstart incubation programme facilitated by Amazon Web Services Asia Pacific.
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Photo by Daniel Chekalov on Unsplash
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