MejaKita

MejaKita, Creating Innovation in Ed-Tech Field

MejaKita is a data-driven peer-to-peer educational-technology platform that empowers students to collaborate in learning. MejaKita was bred out of a simple vision of empowering Indonesian students nationwide to collaborate in learning and contribute towards enhancing each other’s quality of studies through data. 

In April 2016, MejaKita came to fruition after its founder, Aktsa Efendy (then based in Singapore), got connected to and began working with Daniar Wahyu and Rozikin Achmad (based in Malang), the two technical founding developers, through the help of Dicoding Indonesia. After bootstrapping for a few years through its corporate sister entity, MejaKerja (www.mejakerja.net), a B2B ed-tech SaaS company, Mejakita has since begun fundraising after being able to crack MejaKita’s business model and grand vision that will continue to drive the technology and economics of MejaKita’s multisided data-driven peer-to-peer ed-tech innovation.

Since then, their mission has transcended to delivering high-quality technological solutions to accommodate students’ day-to-day learning needs globally especially in developing,  underserved markets while balancing profit and growth.

Creating Innovation in Ed-Tech Field

After having studied in four different countries (Indonesia, Singapore, Melbourne, and the United States) spanning across three continents, Mejakita’s founder found that educational markets are always swarmed with conventional and technological solutions aplenty, albeit always limited to serve the primary market consisting of the top 1% of students economically who had short-term academic goals, such as national or standardized exams. 

On the other hand, most people always observe underserved students in the secondary market with no short-term academic goals or students in the primary market who were disadvantaged in the academic race for not being able to afford tutoring help. They found that if they could bridge students to be able to both learn, teach, and earn through helping each other out in their studies, they could not only democratize learning for all, but also return the ownership of learning back to students in the whole process.

Transcending beyond a conventional online tutoring space whose suite of content is limited to its in-house producers, Mejakita’s platform continues to grow in breadth and quality of content. As the number of students grow and contributors become even more abundant, the curation and acumination of students in the platform are also enhanced.

Mejakita’s platform consists of four main features:

1. Diskusi PR+: a community forum where students can ask and answer questions. Whenever students post questions, Contributors with indicated expertise in the specific subject, topic, and grade level as well as demonstrated history of successfully answering similar questions will be notified to bid to answer those questions, as they will be monetarily rewarded for every questions they answer and approved of being a useful answer by those who post said questions
2. Berbagi Catatan: notes sharing platform, where students can simply take pictures or scan their studying notes, upload them to MejaKita, and earn money from increased engagement of their own notes, such as in increased number of reads, bookmarks, and likes their notes get. 
3. Try Out+: simulation tests to prepare for standardized exams, currently only limited for the entrance exam for Indonesian students to gain admissions to local universities, namely the UTBK. Students get to key in their dream colleges, and get rationalized insights on their chances of admissions to said colleges through comparing their performance with the country’s national average, as well as targeted alternative college recommendations based on various weighted preferred indicative factors that are determined by the students themselves (e.g. major choices, geographical locations, etc.). Students also get personalized analytics and learning content recommendations based on their mapped weaknesses, which exponentially increases in personalization and accuracy the more they take simulations in the platform
4. MejaKoin and MejaKash: their digital currency system to monetize the activity on the platform. In MejaKita, students top up their MejaKoins to utilise features in the platform, such as to buy simulation exams or ask questions, and Contributors get an 80% dividend cut in the form of MejaKash, which they can eventually withdraw to the local currency— in their case, that is the Indonesian rupiah.

Currently, their solution is only available in Indonesia, but Mejakita’s products’ value transcends language and region. Being a peer-to-peer platform that leverages user-generated content and capitalizes on interactions as opposed to content production and supply, their solution is applicable across virtually all markets. They are particularly interested in being able to bring their solutions to developing Southeast Asian countries, such as Thailand and Vietnam, and then to much larger markets in the world, especially whose students partake in economically largely valued standardized exams, such as the SATs, IB, and Cambridge Exams common across commonwealth countries, Asian countries, as well as the giants in the west such as the USA and UK.

They hope to once for and all be able to truly democratize learning for all to level educational playing fields and push towards not just educational equality, but move towards equity, all the while by empowering students to collaborate and build a sense of critically engaged empathy through helping others and reclaiming their ownership in learning. Especially for developing countries in Southeast Asia, they wish to empower students to be the very agents of change that could push their countries towards moving up the global educational ladder such as in the PISA or TIMSS standings, as well as enacting more transcendental educational change by rethinking what is possible when you actually give students the autonomy to take charge in their own learning and helping others as well. 

Even more so, they aim to provide jobs and diverse sources of income to anyone who resonate with their mission; be it a primary school student or even a college undergraduate, anyone who is keen to help others thrive in their studies can make a humble living in MejaKita.

Mejakita’s Milestones and Plans

Throughout their journey in revolutionizing the ed-tech field, Mejakita has reached a remarkable milestones that set their solid path to their long-term plan:

1. Per November 2020, they now have 40,000+ students in 316 cities across Indonesia
2. Top 5 startup in UNDP AIS’ Innovation Challenge 2020
3. Top 50 educational-technology startup across Asia Pacific during Creatella Ventures’ Edu-Tech Competition 2020
4. Panelist on Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation’s (APEC) joint workshop with Indonesia’s Ministry of Education, Trade, and Foreign Affairs on the topic of “Leveraging Technology to Improve Educational Quality in Rural Areas” which was attended by ministry of education representatives from 8 countries globally (2019)
5. Selected as one of the 37 most impactful ed-tech movements in Indonesia to meet with Indonesia’s Minister of Education, Mr Nadiem Anwar Makarim, to propose solutions to forward Indonesia’s grand educational vision (2019)
6. Officially commended by the Ministry of Education as one of the few selected edu-tech platforms that are recommended to support the home-based learning of Indonesian students nationwide and thus made available for free to access through mobile data for all students in the country throughout the Covid-19 pandemic (2020)

Until 2032, they have made a solid development plan for Mejakita:

1. Seed round closed by Q2 2021 to supercharge technological development and support PMF as well as growth efforts
2. 100,000+ questions answered by 2021 with 90% satisfaction rate amongst students
3. Incorporated MejaKita’s Recommendation Engine powered by machine learning by 2021 across all features to enhance curation and acumination of users to accelerate matchmaking speeds and accuracy
4. Presence in 2 other Southeast Asian countries by 2022
5. 2-digit EBITDA by 2023
6. Series A closed by early 2023
7. Global presence in 2023, serving western markets
8. USD$4 million+ in ARR for combined subscription sales and AdSense traffic revenue by 2023
9. 20% MAU and 5% DAU at 500k+ users by 2023

MejaKita’s team is led by a blend of college students and graduates who are united with a shared vision of enhancing learning globally through data. 

Aktsa Efendy, Founder and CEO

• University of Washington, BSc Economics, College of Arts and Sciences (Class of 2024)
• Former winter 2020 data analyst at Deloitte Consulting (Jakarta, Indonesia)
• Former spring 2020 financial risk advisor at Deloitte (Jakarta, Indonesia)
• Former summer 2020 risk consultant at PwC (Jakarta, Indonesia)
• Corporate Finance Institute – Financial Modelling and Valuation Analyst (Class of 2021)

Rest of the team:

1. Daniar Wahyu, Head of Product (National University of Malang)
2. Achmad Rozikin, Head of Information (National Technological Institute of Malang)
3. Lanang Agung, UI/UX Designer (Asia University)
4. Christian Andy, Full-stack Developer (National University of Malang)
5. Ilham Irfani, Mobile App Developer (Brawijaya University)
6. Sri Rahmawati, Marketing Director (University of Indonesia)
7. Nida Nur Maulida, Academics Director (University of Indonesia)
8. Aulia Nafitri, PR Director (University of Indonesia)
9. Fajar Ahmadi, Creative Director (Bandung Institute of Technology)
10. Alifa Hana Syahrani, Business Development Associate (Bandung Institute of Technology)