SA's Digemy changing the way corporates educate employees, customers

Launched early in 2017, Digemy is a provider of educational technology platforms to corporates that focus on building and retaining knowledge, rather than the consumption of learning material.

This technology is provided in audio, video and text format on mobile, tablet and PC. Co-founder Kobus Louw told Disrupt Africa that before Digemy corporates had been unable to measure the return on investment from employee education.

Digemy set out to solve these issues by creating an algorithm to measure the knowledge of a learner on a specific topic, and then to increase knowledge by feeding the correct information at the correct time, changing the conventional method of studying for “passery” to studying for “mastery”.

The platform provides corporates with in-depth insights into the knowledge levels of employees, from course-level to the most granular level of every syllabus. Training material is delivered in bite-size chunks in an unintrusive format for consumption anytime, anywhere.

“Apart from employee education, we aim to change the way corporates educate their clients.  Executives appreciate the fact that clients often don’t understand their products and services, especially financial products. The first major issue we are taking head-on, is the lack of financial literacy in South Africa,” said Louw.

“We aim to change the population’s perception of money, budgeting, credit and saving, and we believe that by educating clients through our technology, we can change behaviour and decrease the client’s probability of defaulting on an agreement while increasing their net worth and savings – addressing two of the biggest financial issues currently in South Africa.”

Digemy, which raised seed funding in February of last year, has seen swift uptake. Louw said it had so far only pitched to three corporates, but had already signed agreements with two of them.

“Sales cycles in corporates are extremely long, but Digemy was able to close these deals in a very short time frame,” he said.

The startup is currently only operating in South Africa, but does have plans to head into other markets.

“Since our clients are multinational, expansion is going international organically at the moment, but we will go international in a more aggressive way in the near future,” Louw said.

Digemy makes money from licence fees, content development and technology product sales, with Louw saying the company is already profitable from an operational standpoint.