Careers at FoondaMate

Careers at FoondaMate

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.

FoondaMate users in Langa, Cape Town

📲 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.

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Our suite of conversational AI applications, include a WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger chatbot that bring curated internet search + quality study material to students — using the hardware and software they already have access to. You can try out the existing product here: https://api.whatsapp.com/send?phone=27600703213&text=hello

🎒 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:

Members of the FoondaMate team in Cape Town, South Africa
Members of the FoondaMate team in Cape Town, South Africa

📰 In the press

We’re not the only ones who think we’re cool 🤞🏾

👩🏿‍💻 Who we’re hiring

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We're currently working on expanding our reach and launching into new markets.
  • 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

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Our investors have invested in:

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!

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We have been remote since 2020. That may change in the future, but we'll always have a flexible work policy for remote work.

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.

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We are big fans of tools like Notion, Tandem, and Slack for remote work, and are always open to suggestions on new tools!

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.

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Working for a startup means that you can come across all kinds of unexpected challenges, and as a team we take responding to these challenges seriously. We really do believe that the easiest way to deal with these challenges is together, and encourage everyone to ask for help when needed.

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.

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FoondaMate can have a huge impact on the lives of our users, and we take this very seriously.

Open Positions

Machine Learning Engineer (Remote)
Machine Learning Engineer (Remote)
Brand and Product Marketer — Remote
Brand and Product Marketer — Remote
Software Engineer (Remote)
Software Engineer (Remote)
Project Manager
Project Manager
Team Assistant (Remote)
Team Assistant (Remote)
Subject Matter Experts — Flexible education gigs
Subject Matter Experts — Flexible education gigs