The problem we kept seeing
Across Africa, edtech builders are solving real problems — a teacher in Lagos building a lesson planning tool, a startup in Nairobi creating student performance dashboards, a developer in Accra working on school management software.
But every single one of them was building from scratch. The same APIs for lesson creation, the same assessment engines, the same attendance tracking, the same analytics pipelines — rebuilt over and over again, in isolation. Education tooling lived in silos. Every builder was reinventing the wheel, burning through time and money solving problems that had already been solved elsewhere.
It didn't have to be this way.
A lesson from Africa's fintech revolution
We looked at what happened with payments. A decade ago, moving money across Africa was painful — fragmented, expensive, and inaccessible. Then came M-Pesa in Kenya, MTN MoMo across West and Central Africa, and later Flutterwave and Paystack. They didn't just build payment apps. They built infrastructure. They created the pipes that thousands of other businesses could build on top of.
Today, a developer in any African country can integrate payments into their app with a few lines of code. That single shift unlocked an entire ecosystem — ride-hailing, e-commerce, lending, insurance, savings — all because someone chose to build the shared infrastructure instead of keeping it locked inside a single product.
We asked ourselves a simple question: Why doesn't education have this?
Just as M-Pesa and Paystack became the infrastructure layer that powers Africa's digital economy, Plum is building the infrastructure layer that will power Africa's education future.
What Plum is
Plum is the API platform for education. We provide the building blocks — lessons, assessments, student tracking, analytics, school management — so that developers, startups, and institutions can focus on what makes their product unique, instead of rebuilding the basics.
A developer integrating Plum shouldn't have to think about how to structure a lesson plan schema, or how to build an auto-grading engine, or how to generate a student progress report. That's our job. Their job is to build the product that changes a student's life.
Built for Africa, built for the world
Africa has over 600 million people under the age of 25. The demand for quality education technology isn't a nice-to-have — it's urgent. But you can't meet that demand if every builder is starting from zero.
We're building Plum because we believe the next generation of African edtech companies shouldn't have to choose between speed and quality. They should get both, out of the box.
We started here because this is where the need is greatest. But the problems we're solving aren't unique to Africa — they're universal. Great infrastructure doesn't stay local for long.
Join us
Whether you're a solo developer with an idea, a startup building the next big thing in education, or a school looking for better tools — Plum is for you. We're just getting started, and we'd love for you to build with us.