Education platform founded by Nas Daily creator bags US$11m in Series A funding

NAS Academy, an educational platform founded by the creator of Nas Daily, has obtained US$11 million in funding in a Series A round led by multi-stage venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners.

The round also saw support from investors TechAviv Founder Partners, 500 Startups, Graph Ventures, FreshFund, Metapurse, Balaji Srinivasan, Coinbase president Emilie Choi, OYO founder Ritesh Agrawal, content creator Markian and the founders of Jellysmack.

Nas Academy allows content creators to create a new course and market to students who may want to learn from them, it said in a statement on Tuesday.

The online education platform was founded in 2020 by Nuseir Yassin, the creator of Nas Daily - known for its one-minute videos on Facebook about Mr Yassin's travel experiences.

The platform's founding and leadership team comprises experienced creators, who help onboard, coach and grow the "academies". The startup also said well-known creators including Smile Squad, Dear Alyne and MingWeiRocks have launched their academies and "generated millions in revenue".

"Nas Academy was born out of a problem I faced. If a creator wants to teach, they need to use multiple services, figure out marketing, and spend a lot of time and effort to build a learning experience. With our support and platform, we make it super easy and straightforward to turn a YouTuber into a 'professor'," Mr Yassin said.

Since inception, Nas Academy has hosted 250 cohorts of full courses covering topics such as storytelling, growing social media presence and building a camera presence, to name a few, it said.

Lightspeed partner Akshay Bhushan said: "New media is increasingly dominated by creators and Nuseir and team, having been successful creators themselves, are uniquely positioned to enable creators to become educators to teach and monetise their respective crafts."