TeenTechEd — a startup that helps students get into top universities abroad

We met an educational startup whose goal is to help young people find opportunities for education abroad.

Botagoz Zhuman, 31 years old, city — Almaty, CEO, Co-Founder TeenTechEd, @zhumanah

How It All Began

TeenTechEd has three founders from different CIS countries — Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Russia. We worked and studied together in the Emirates, in three different fields — engineering, robotics, and education.

We had a common idea — to improve the quality of education in our countries. To do this, we created social projects aimed at sustainable ecological development and children's education in remote regions. For example, we developed a mobile game for children that taught them to save water.

Then, people started asking us how to apply abroad. At that point, we decided to create a company to help students find grants and obtain tuition discounts at foreign universities. We hired coordinators who helped students from various parts of the world. However, each of them could work with only 20 people at a time. Therefore, we created an AI consultant named Teena. It can freely advise young people on selecting programs and admission requirements. The database contains a lot of information accumulated over years of work. Thus, we help a large number of students without the bottleneck of a coordinator.

The Team

Our team consists of experts in engineering, education, IT, and science.
We started working on the startup by testing concepts and hypotheses among different audiences. The first project was a chatbot that helped students find mentors. Then, we developed an AI consultant that answers customer questions. Its responses are based on a well-developed script and database, and therefore differ from internet search results.

Target Audience

Our target audience is students interested in studying abroad, aged 16 to 35. Our AI consultant is also useful for an older audience, as it offers information not only about undergraduate programs but also about master's and doctoral programs.
We launched recently, but our client base already numbers 15,000 people.

Acceleration Programs

We participated in Scalerator from Astana Hub and IRA from MOST IT Business Accelerator, under which we received a grant from USAID. We were also recognized as one of the four best startups in Kazakhstan at Draper Show, which took place at Digital Bridge 2023.

Currently, we are also going through various proprietary acceleration programs.

Challenges

Being a female-founded startup in the CIS is not easy. For some investors, this is a risk zone. But we see that trends in the venture industry are changing. We know of individual venture stories where women received support. We would like to see more such programs in the region.

Achievements

The period from 2022 to 2023 was productive for us: we started operations in Kazakhstan, and since then, we have been actively helping students with studying abroad and finding international internships.

We also participated in various educational programs, successfully launched the AI consultant, and organized several charity events.

Plans

We have ambitious plans: to fully complete and launch the platform, and to digitize the process of studying abroad.

Structural changes are occurring in the company: we are actively developing departments, collaborating with experts, and making every effort to develop and further scale.