Klas

Klas is an online teaching platform that lets individuals and organizations set up a virtual school and sell live classes, courses and e-books. Its feature set covers class scheduling (recurring, cohort and one-time classes with timezone detection and Google Calendar integration), enrollment management, student dashboards, analytics on attendance, classes and revenue, email marketing, community features, online tests, integrations, and payments through Klas pay, which supports USD and NGN. Classes are hosted in the company's own virtual classroom rather than third-party conferencing tools, and sessions can be recorded and stored in the cloud.

The company was founded in 2022 by CEO Nathan Nwachuku and CTO Lekan Adejumo, and targets subjects ranging from coding and design to finance, art and languages. Its co-founders position the product against incumbents such as Kajabi and Thinkific by offering a simpler, fully integrated toolset aimed at first-time creators, and against Udemy and Skillshare by focusing on live rather than pre-recorded instruction. Klas is a Techstars-backed company and raised $1 million in pre-seed funding announced in February 2024.

Founding story

Nathan Nwachuku conceived Klas after an accident in which he lost an eye and spent two months in a coma, followed by a six-month break from school. Interested in physics, he considered running a paid online physics class but found existing online education platforms complex, prompting the idea of a simpler tool. He taught himself to code, declined a scholarship to Canada and dropped out of college to work on Klas full-time, founding the company at age 18. In 2021 he was joined by co-founder and CTO Lekan Adejumo; the pair raised a $180,000 angel round, launched the platform, and entered Techstars the following year.

Business model

Klas operates a self-serve SaaS marketplace model for course creators: users open an online school on the platform and sell live classes, courses and e-books to their own students, with Klas providing the classroom, scheduling, community, analytics and payments infrastructure.

The platform is offered on a free plan that carries a 5% transaction fee on bookings. At the time of the 2024 funding announcement the company indicated pricing could rise and that it planned an enterprise product for corporate upskilling priced at $199 per month, positioning itself below incumbents priced between $49 and $399.

Traction

In February 2024 the company reported more than 5,000 online schools (creators) and 300,000 learners across more than 30 countries, with creators having earned "hundreds of thousands of dollars" on the platform. Company pages report 35k+ users, 30+ online schools and 15 countries, while the homepage cites more than 1.2K online schools and over 85k students globally; one report also cites over 125,000 students and 2,200 online academies. Klas has stated a goal of powering 100,000 online schools worldwide by 2027.

Latest developments

In February 2024 Klas announced a $1 million pre-seed round led by Ingressive Capital, with participation from Techstars, HoaQ and angel investors, earmarked for global scaling of the teaching platform, expansion into India and North America, localized currency support, and a planned $199-per-month enterprise product for corporate upskilling.