Thoufeeque Saheer, a Kochiite now settled in Turkey, turned an entrepreneur almost by accident.
When the 36-year-old ideated a knowledge sharing platform three years ago just before the outbreak of the pandemic, it was at best a hobby during his spare time as a software development manager with a U.S. company. But the interest it generated among the incubator and accelerator programmes including that of universities saw it getting scaled up into an ed-tech start-up, Archi’s Academy, offering an online and mentoring platform for mothers, grad students and career switchers. It has since made its presence felt in the field of education technology in Turkey, training a large number of people in a short period of time.
Archi’s Academy is headquartered in Eskisehir Technopark, Turkey, with a strategic U.S. presence at the University of Illinois Enterprise Works in Champaign Urbana.
From a hobby, the start-up has now turned into Mr. Saheer’s sole focus following which he quit his job last year.
And then the budding start-up just shot into fame when it won the ‘Best Ed-Tech Startup’ in the Accelerator category pipping over 100 teams at Teknofest, one of the largest technology fests in Turkey, conducted by the Ministry of Technology and Industry, Turkey, earlier this month. Ever since the President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, gave away the award, the interest in the start-up has registered a quantum leap.
Biggest USP
“In the last 18 months our 15 developers worked almost 25,000 hours developing an indigenous Learning Management System (LMS) that completely changed the game and gave us an edge among our competitors. Our focus remains software development and our LMS simulates the real working environment in tech companies bridging the often huge gap between theory and practice. Making training flexible and affordable for synchronous and asynchronous learning without dropouts that is so intrinsic to online learning remains the biggest USP of our in-house LMS,” said Mr. Saheer., Founder and CEO of Archi’s Academy.
Having moved to Turkey five years ago since his wife is a Turkish national, Mr. Saheer chose to set up the development centre and test run the project there owing to a slew of favourable factors including lower operation cost and far less competition since most of the players don’t have an own LMS.
The academy is now a part of ITU Celirdek, the #1 university business incubator, and is also aligned with the renowned global accelerator program, Innogate, and the prestigious TIM TEB Startup House’s Level Up.
Archi’s Academy has KT Portföy, the venture capital wing of Kuveyt Turk, a major banking company, as its lead investor. The start-up is now looking for investments for scaling up.
“At this stage, South India along with Turkey and the UAE remain our primary market. We have collaboration with various universities in Bengaluru, Kerala, and Andhra Pradesh,” said Mr. Saheer who is planning to relocate to the U.S. shortly for attracting greater investments.
