Lena, a Lagos-based educational technology startup that turns primary-school lessons into digital games, has entered the selection process for the fourth cohort of the Mastercard Foundation EdTech Fellowship run in Nigeria by Co-creation HUB. The contest offers a potentially transformative prize for an early-stage company: $100,000 in equity-free funding and an 18-month programme of product, distribution, talent and investment-readiness support.
The official programme page says Cohort IV is designed for Nigerian startups building practical solutions for learners who are routinely missed by mainstream education technology, including children living with disabilities, pupils in rural or underserved communities, internally displaced learners, and young girls and women. It will also consider companies building education-data systems that can work inside real schools rather than only in well-connected demonstration environments.
That brief is unusually close to Lena’s product thesis. The company describes its platform as an AI-powered learning game and tutor that helps children improve in mathematics and literacy at their own pace, while giving teachers and parents performance information. Its most important design claim is not the artificial intelligence itself, but the effort to make the full system – games, computer-based tests, analytics and report cards – usable without constant internet access.
Game Built Around Realities of African Classrooms
Lena’s founders argue that many learning apps misunderstand how children actually spend time on a phone. Instead of placing points and badges around a conventional quiz, Lena builds curriculum questions into the mechanics of a game. In its runner format, a pupil advances by solving increasingly difficult problems, while the software quietly returns to concepts the child previously missed. The aim is to make repetition feel like play rather than remedial work.
Behind the game is an adaptive tutoring layer trained around school curricula. It identifies weak areas, changes the level of difficulty and offers simpler explanations when a learner is stuck. For schools, the product includes dashboards and automated assessment tools that can help teachers see which pupils need attention. The startup has also said it is incorporating accessibility features such as text-to-speech and is developing a WhatsApp-based tutor for households with limited hardware or data.
Those choices matter in a fellowship that is explicitly looking for inclusive products designed for unstable connectivity and limited infrastructure. They also reflect a hard lesson from Lena’s own early testing: a product can work smoothly on the founders’ devices and still fail on the older, low-cost Android phones used by many of its intended customers.
Faruk Bilesanmi: From Freelance Developer to Education Founder
Faruk Bilesanmi, Lena’s co-founder and chief technology officer, did not begin his career with a plan to reform education. His partnership with co-founder Danny Ombeh began in 2020, during the pandemic, when Bilesanmi had secured freelance work and needed a designer. The two worked on projects for clients in Nigeria and abroad, initially through the sort of online freelance assignments that have become an informal apprenticeship for many young African technologists.
The relationship grew beyond client work. Both men had mothers who were teachers, giving them an unusually close view of the difficulty of holding a child’s attention and the shortage of tools that allow one teacher to respond differently to dozens of pupils. Before Lena, they worked on other startup ideas, including a property-technology venture that failed to achieve scale. The experience appears to have made them less interested in building elegant technology without a clear distribution path.
The immediate idea for Lena came from watching a younger relative spend hours playing FIFA. Bilesanmi’s question was simple: if children could sustain that level of concentration in a game, could the same medium be used to teach mathematics? An early version was tested with his primary-school cousin and the cousin’s friends. Their enthusiasm encouraged the founders to continue, but the first broader user tests exposed a problem. The game had largely been built and tested on iPhones; many real users were playing on Tecno phones or older hand-me-down Android devices, where it performed poorly.
The team rebuilt the experience as a lighter runner game that could load faster and operate on cheaper devices. That episode captures Bilesanmi’s role in Lena: he is not merely adding AI to a school product but adapting the technology to the constraints of the market. Outside Lena, he has been listed as a full-stack developer and chief technology officer at digital agency SynergeticBytes, and his public comments show a continuing interest in locally trained artificial intelligence.
In 2025, Bilesanmi was among developers experimenting with N-ATLAS, Nigeria’s open-source language models for Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo and Nigerian-accented English. He said he had connected the Yoruba and Nigerian-English speech-recognition model to a microphone for live translation and was exploring its use in Lena’s offline application. The longer-term ambition is to let children learn in familiar languages and accents while still receiving automated feedback – a technically demanding goal, but one that would make Lena more relevant outside elite urban schools.
Early Traction, and the Difficult Economics of Edtech
Lena launched commercially in September 2025. By March 2026, Techpoint Africa reported that it had onboarded two schools covering about 380 pupils, attracted 228 parent users, secured $15,000 in grants and was closing an angel round. Earlier in the year, the company won the Silver award at the Lagos State Employment Trust Fund’s Idea Hub 12.0, a programme that began with more than 1,000 applications and selected 20 startups for support before six finalists pitched on demo day.
The numbers remain those of a young company rather than an established education platform. School sales can involve long negotiations, and the child using the product is often different from the parent paying for it and the administrator deciding whether to buy it. Building each new game can also resemble the expensive work of a small games studio rather than the simple release cycle of conventional software.
This is why the Mastercard Foundation fellowship could matter beyond the headline funding. CcHUB says selected companies receive help aligning products with educational needs, finding distribution, strengthening teams and building the evidence and narrative required to attract later capital. For Lena, such support could help test whether its early engagement results translate into durable learning gains, improve its offline systems and move from a small number of private schools to a repeatable school-distribution model.
In the Race, but not yet Over the Line
Applications for Cohort IV closed on April 10 and are being assessed through three stages: an initial review of problem-solution fit, founder potential, business model and traction; a deeper evaluation of scalability, vision, competitive advantage and team quality; and interviews followed by due diligence. The programme website says the applications are still under review and has not publicly identified the finalists.
Lena can plausibly argue that it fits the fellowship’s central demand: technology built not for ideal classrooms, but for the devices, connectivity and teaching constraints that African children encounter every day. Its case will ultimately depend on evidence – whether pupils learn more, schools continue paying and the product can scale without losing the quality of its games. For Bilesanmi, the fellowship race is the next test of a proposition that began with a child playing FIFA: that the attention captured by games can be redirected towards the foundations of learning.
