Taamkru plans to fix Thailand’s ‘disgracefully bad’ education system, raises seed money

Thailand ranks eighth out of 10 in Southeast Asia for education. That’s a low bar, considering most of the field are developing nations. This prompted Thai startup Taamkru to embark on a mission to improve, in its own words, the country’s ‘disgracefully bad’ education system.

Now, the internet company has received a huge boost, in the form of a US$620,000 seed funding round led by Silicon Valley fund and accelerator 500 Startups. M&S Partners, IMJ Investment Partners, Ookbee, and Red Dot Ventures also invested this time.

Taamkru, which translates to ‘ask the teacher’ in Thai, hopes to change education through its web and mobile apps, giving pre-schoolers a fun, gamified way to prepare for examinations in a manner that black-and-white paper workbooks can’t. Its platform also lets parents track their child’s performance and benchmark it against other kids in the nation.

To market itself, the company has been organizing nationwide contests where children take a test that “provides parents with an accurate measure of the true analytical and reasoning ability of their child benchmarked against indicator data.” The competition has so far attracted 20,000 preschool applicants from Thailand and China.

Taamkru CEO and co-founder Wicharn Manawanitjarern tells Tech in Asia that the startup now sees 100,000 monthly active users across its web, iOS, and Android apps. 5,000 of them come from Singapore. It began monetizing mainly through advertising on its website, but recently started offering in-app purchases in the form of extra assessment content. It plans to move into B2B sales (selling to schools) and revenue sharing arrangements with content creators through an online publishing marketplace for preschool workbooks.

“What’s more interesting is that monthly active users grew as exercises get released more frequently. It shows that our users are hooked on what we offer, which aligns with our intention of driving usage through ever-expanding exercise inventory,” says the founder.

Taamkru executives (in black) at an event announcing their plans.

Can tech fix Thailand?

Much ink has been spilled about the state of education in the country. A British-American teacher in Thailand calls it a “terrible failure” on CNN iReport. She writes:

Plagued by inadequate funding, huge class sizes (more than 50 students to a class), terrible teacher training, lazy students and a system that forces teachers to pass students even though they’ve actually failed – there doesn’t seem to be much hope education in Thailand will improve any time soon.

That’s not all. She complains about changes to rules and guidelines every semester and how educators routinely ignore plagiarism.

A series of reports by Asian Correspondent blames it on the shoddy quality of the standardized tests. The National Institute of Educational Testing Service (NIETS) came under fire for exam questions with disputable answers. The author writes: