MUGALIM — a startup that teaches effective teaching methods

Aisuluu Zhamangulova, city — Bishkek, CEO and co-founder of MUGALIM, @aisuluu.zhamangulova

How it all started

The project was initiated during the pandemic in August 2020, as a volunteer project during the transition to online learning. At that time, we just wanted to help teachers transition to online learning. At the time, we had no idea where it would all end up. Between August and December 2020, over 1000 teachers were trained with the help of over 300 mentors.

Team

In December 2020, we completed the volunteer project. But working closely with teachers, we realized that there were a lot of gaps and problems, which reflected on the quality of education in general. By then, we realized that the quality of children's education cannot be higher than the quality of teachers. Then we decided to continue: we prepared a pitch, found an investor and started making an online platform for teacher training. In the beginning we had three female founders and we did everything ourselves. Today we have six people in the team. We have a platform with online courses, where courses from the Ministry of Education of the Kyrgyz Republic, UNICEF, MERCYCORP and other experts are placed.

Online courses are good, but it is not enough. We want to help teachers in the very process of delivering lessons, also help them automate routine activities and free up more time for creative effective delivery of lessons. In March 2024, we launched the MUGALIM AI — platform, an AI-based tool for schools and teachers.

Target audience

We aim to inspire and support teachers and students at every stage of the educational process by creating innovative and interactive tools that make learning more engaging, efficient and effective.

For schools, our platform will keep a finger on the pulse of the quality of learning. Student and teacher data will be collected and analyzed, allowing the school to make data-driven decisions.

For the teacher, our platform allows generating lesson plans, tests, interactive games and other educational materials in two clicks. These materials will be based on countries' educational standards, children's age-specific characteristics and the fundamentals of neuropedagogy. Creating and administering assessments on the platform will save teacher time, identify children who are falling behind, and generate recommendations and tips to improve teaching practices.

The student will be able to take the test online and immediately receive personalized recommendations where knowledge needs to be strengthened.

Our target audience is schools, teachers and students with parents who want to diagnose the quality of learning in a timely manner and improve their performance through working with personalized recommendations.

We launched on March 3, 2024 and have gained over 7000 registered users, of which an average of 900 users were actively using the platform on a daily basis.

Incubation programs

We participated in programs like Accelerate Prosperity, which gave us insight into how startups work and generally inspired us to work in this format. Subsequently, we participated in the PEAK program and the EBRR mentorship program to support women entrepreneurs.

Challenges

Starting a startup, you have to get used to the idea that there will be a lot of difficulties and it's better to stop calling them difficulties. And they have not passed us by, there was a time when we thought of shutting everything down altogether. But our mission is strong in us, we believe in it and that's why we keep working despite everything.

For those who are at the initial stage of creating a startup, I would advise them not to cling to an idea, but to follow the needs of the audience and start earlier.

Achievements

MUGALIM AI achievements:

— in three months we developed a platform with all key features

— attracted the first 7000 users to the platform without any marketing budget — tested the monetization model and attracted the first paying customers

— received a 100% scholarship to participate with this project in the Swift Launch accelerator program.

Plans

At the moment we are actively finalizing the platform to enter the markets of three countries: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. We are actively looking for schools for piloting, applying for foreign accelerator programs and looking for investors.