Lena goes to school
Using AI to help school kids learn faster and better
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Startup: Lena
Location: Nigeria
Ask: Raising $100k to accelerate product development, and invest in customer acquisition campaigns to scale to more schools.
Every middle-class Nigerian kid of a certain age can describe their lesson teacher. The one who showed up at the house around 4 p.m., shared a chair at the dining table, and walked you through long division while the rest of the family watched Super Story. If you grew up in Lagos in the nineties, this person was as much a fixture of your week as church.
That arrangement, which Nigerians call lesson, sometimes extra moral, sometimes home coaching, never went away. If anything, it grew up. Edugist puts the after-school tutoring market in Nigeria in the billions of naira annually, almost all of it off the books. Children in nursery and primary school are now enrolled in coaching centres running 4 to 7 p.m. on weekdays. Some six-year-olds are already being prepped for common entrance exams.
In a country where grades are often gatekeepers to a better life, every parent will pay for school twice if they think the second school will work.
Startups have tried to build a second school for kids. Some have succeeded, like uLesson, which raised $25 million to digitize the Nigerian curriculum. It did so well, they started an open university on the same thesis.
Some have also failed. Edukoya raised one of the largest pre-seed rounds in African edtech history, $3.5M in 2021, and shut down in February 2025 after 80,000 students and 15 million answered questions.
The math is brutal: high acquisition cost, a fragmented buyer, and parents who price-anchor against a human lesson teacher charging ₦25,000 a month.
Next Capital sat down with Faruk Bilesanmi, the co-founder of Lena, a Lagos-based edtech with a contrarian pitch. Don’t sell to parents, sell to schools. Don’t make videos, make games. Skip secondary school, go primary. And don’t try to be Khan Academy. Try to be the lesson teacher, but inside a runner game.
A runner game that doubles as primary school maths
Farouk and his co-founder Danny are two technical guys whose mothers happen to be teachers. They spent the last few years working at startups, and built a proptech startup that never quite scaled. The idea for Lena’s came from Farouk watching his younger cousin burn entire afternoons on FIFA.
He thought,every Nigerian kid is already playing games on their parents’ phones. What if the game taught them maths? So he started building Lena.
The version 1 was a math race-off. They tested it on Farouk’s cousin in primary school, who tested it with his friends, who liked it. So they kept going.
By late 2025, they had signed up a handful of parents via word-of-mouth. By January, they had two paying schools and a student headcount of almost 500.
Then they ran their first customer-wide feedback round and found a problem. Most of the tests they did on the game happened on iPhones.
But nearly every kid playing the game was on a parent’s Tecno or a hand-me-down Android, and the game barely ran. The team had built a beautiful product for the wrong device.
The pivot was a runner game. Imagine Subway Surfers, but with every coin being a math question. This new game was lighter on graphics, faster to load, runs on anything.
This is Lena’s current product. An AI tutor (sitting on OpenAI’s API) throws progressively harder questions at kids as they play the game, and the kid racks up more points if they get them correctly.
The game then quietly replays the questions the kid previously missed, allowing them another shot at it. This way, kids get to spend all the time they want playing games while still building a strong math background. Performance data flows to parents, teachers, and school admins on WhatsApp.
Lena reports a 30% improvement among students using the platform, measured via adaptive tests that re-throw missed questions and track whether the student answers them correctly the second and third time.
About 40% of current users are female, which matters in a country where girls’ STEM engagement tends to fall off as schooling progresses.
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Money Talk
Lena charges in three tiers.
A full plan at ₦15,000 per student per term for top-end private schools.
A reduced plan, with weaker AI capabilities, for mid-tier schools.
And a “paid trial” at ₦1,000–1,500 per student per term, which the team uses to break into schools that have already locked in this year’s budget and won’t budge.
Current revenue is around ₦600k monthly across 43 active students, but there’s a wave of LOIs in the pipeline expected to onboard roughly 8,200 students in the next week.
Sales channels are organic: events, user referrals, and chapter heads who run their own schools and refer Lena to others after seeing it work in their classrooms.
The team is small and focused: two technical co-founders, a Head of Learning hired recently to own curriculum, and a five-person engineering bench (front-end, QA, PM, game dev, game designer).
The Big Picture
The market underneath this is larger than the Nigerian edtech track record suggests. Nigeria has roughly 5.4 million children in private primary schools and about 55,000 private primary schools, with Lagos alone hosting nearly 15,000 of them. Even at a lower-tier price of ₦5,000 per student per term, capturing 1% of those schools at 200 students each pencils out to about ₦1.65B in annual revenue. The full-plan version is several times that.
But Edtech has seen very few successes in Nigeria and currently only gets 2% of the country’s VC funding.
Yet, there’s reason to think Lena’s different. It’s a sticky game with B2B economics. Lena sells to schools, charge per student, push retention through gamification rather than parental enforcement.
What could go wrong?
Quite a few. Nigerian edtech’s structural problem is that the buyer is not the user, so communicating value can be hard. Even in Lena’s case, students are the real adopters and users, parents are the payers, and schools are the buyers.
Sales is grassroots and never gets easier; with hundreds of individual decision-makers each running their own school. Lena’s team reports going back and forth 20-25 times to close one school. That’s a brutal CAC even when the per-student LTV looks reasonable on paper.
Competitive risk cuts both ways. Secondary school edtech in Nigeria is a bloodbath , every JAMB prep app, every WAEC content library, every school-management SaaS lives there. Primary is quieter because it’s harder to monetize per student and the parents are less desperate. That gives Lena breathing room now, but uLesson can come downmarket if it wants to, and any well-capitalized school group could build a thinner version in-house.
Then there’s the attention problem. One game won’t hold a primary schooler’s interest for very long. Lena knows this, and it has English and science games in development, plus a VR/AR science lab concept that would let students run experiments in a controlled environment. But every new game is functionally a new product.
The roadmap looks less like a SaaS release schedule and more like a games studio’s, with all the lumpy capital intensity that implies.
Lena lives inside a budget line that already exists in every middle-class Nigerian household: the lesson teacher line. The demand is the lesson teacher economy. The distribution is schools. Lena is trying to be both at once.
Can a runner game become the new lesson teacher?
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