Saudi edtech startup GAGA has closed a $2.5 million pre-Series A round led by Phoenix Venture Partners, with family offices and individual investors also participating. That brings total funding to $4.2 million since the company was founded in 2021.
Abdullah Alkharsani and Eyad Alshabaan started GAGA with a straightforward frustration: most edtech platforms hand students a video and call it learning. GAGA’s model is different — every session is live, with a real teacher on the other end. The platform now covers more than 1,000 programmes across 200 subjects for students aged 4 to 18, mixing academic coursework with skill-based learning.
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It’s a crowded space, but the live-first bet appears to be working.
The company uses gamification to hold younger students’ attention and is quietly building AI tools in the background — not to replace teachers, but to identify knowledge gaps and adjust what each student encounters next. Think of it less as a tutoring app and more as an adaptive layer on top of human instruction.
The fresh capital goes toward three things: more teachers, a deeper Arabic-language content library, and continued AI development. Saudi Arabia is the near-term priority, though the playbook — local language, live instruction, adaptive tech — isn’t hard to replicate across the Gulf.
The raise also puts GAGA in the company of a small but growing cohort of Gulf-focused edtech startup, attracting early institutional capital. Saudi Arabia’s edtech market is projected to cross $1 billion by 2027, driven by a young population, high smartphone penetration, and a government actively pushing digital education under Vision 2030. For investors, the live-learning segment remains undercapitalised relative to its potential, which may explain why Phoenix Venture Partners led the round despite the relatively modest ticket size.
Private tutoring in the region is a multi-billion-dollar habit. GAGA’s argument is that it can offer something better, at scale, for less.
