Studying online. For anyone, from anywhere.
FoondaMate helps students access quality study material and knowledge quickly and affordably on WhatsApp using AI.
Our goal is to help the 300M+ students currently unable to use the internet to study, or struggling to find useful information, access the information they need to succeed.
We believe talent is equally distributed, but opportunities are not. Less than 7% of African households have a computer in them and the majority of students in the developing world are excluded from online learning.
📲 What we do?
We're on a mission to equip students in the emerging markets and beyond with the tools they need to succeed. We build chatbots that bring quality study material and curated internet search to messaging apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.
🎒 Who uses FoondaMate?
Since our launch in 2020 FoondaMate has been used by 1M+ students in 150+ countries. Our focus has been on the South African market to date, but we are working on expanding into new countries all the time and helping students all over the world.
⭐ What’s the team like?
We think we’re pretty cool.
The current team is from 🇿🇦 🇮🇪 🇮🇩 🇳🇬 and we love working with people from all over the world.
We all care a lot about honesty, hard work and respect. And of course education.
We started FoondaMate because of our own experiences struggling to access education:

📰 In the press
We’re not the only ones who think we’re cool 🤞🏾
👩🏿💻 Who we’re hiring
- This means there's a lot of work being done on code quality, Data Engineering. Machine Learning, product localisation, DevOps, making the product available via a myriad of frontends as well as reaching and engaging the students that need our products.
- Please see our open positions at the bottom of the page.
🚀 We’re backed by some of the best investors in the word
- We announced our $2M Seed Round in May 2022.
- We are looking for people who are comfortable with things changing quickly, working with ambiguity and testing everything.
- We are always looking to improve and learn from each other, and one of the most important features of our team is willingness to make mistakes and fix them.
Our Seed Round included some of the top investors in the world
- Figma, Wise (formerly TransferWise), and Bitly (LocalGlobe)
- Andela, Flutterwave (LoftyInc)
And have founded companies including:
What it's like working at FoondaMate
We are a remote-first team
Where in the world you work from doesn't matter to us as much as the value that you can add to our team, both as a person, and in your area of expertise. As long as you have good internet access you can work from anywhere!
We are asynchronous first
Because we are remote and have team members across many timezones, we focus on asynchronous communication over meetings. We focus on good documentation and written communication, with meetings reserved primarily for planning, social and “show and tell” purposes.
We are up for a challenge
Our values are centred around excellence, doing our work well, helping each other out, trusting each other, and not running away from challenges and difficult situations.
Our users are our top priority
We care a great deal about the product we are building and how they impact our users' lives and prospects.