The bootstrapped startup combines offline learning, curriculum-based practice, student competition and AI tutoring — built specifically around Ethiopia’s Grade 9–12 curriculum.

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia — September 16, 2026 — When Grade 12 student Mignot Tglemos started using PrepX, she told the team that Mathematics was one of her hardest subjects.

98.33 out of 100 in Mathematics.

She also scored 96.25 in Chemistry, 86.67 in Physics and finished with a total score of 544.25 out of 600.

Before the exam, Mignot had answered 1,495 questions on PrepX, with an accuracy of 89.6%.

“I found the app very useful and until now am really happy. I mean the detailed notes are really satisfying,” she told the PrepX team.

One student’s result cannot establish that an app caused an exam score. But Mignot’s experience captures what PrepX founder Habtamu Asefa wants the product to become: something students can use every day to understand difficult material, practise it repeatedly and walk into an exam better prepared.

PrepX is an Ethiopian-built learning startup designed specifically around the country’s Grade 9–12 curriculum and national entrance examination.

Since launching publicly in March 2026, the Android app has passed 1,700 downloads without paid marketing.

Its library now contains more than 1,800 curriculum topics, 220,000 questions and 12 years of Ethiopian university entrance examinations. Students have already answered more than 46,000 questions through the platform. PrepX’s curriculum experience includes notes, flashcards, quizzes and increasingly difficult worksheets, while past entrance questions can be explored by topic and year.

The startup has not received grant funding. Development has so far been financed by the founder, including through freelance software work on Upwork.

“For a long time, the routine was very simple: work for clients at night so we could keep building PrepX during the day,” Asefa said. “There was no grant and no marketing budget. We just kept working on the product.”

Built around the Ethiopian student, not adapted afterward

PrepX started with a constraint: it had to make sense for an Ethiopian student before anything else.

That meant structuring the national curriculum chapter by chapter and topic by topic, incorporating real entrance examinations, designing around inconsistent internet access, and making AI aware of what a student is actually studying.

The result is a product the team thinks of in three layers.

1. Study even when the internet disappears

At its most basic layer, PrepX is designed to remain useful without a constant connection.

Learning resources a student has already visited remain accessible offline, and students can download an entire chapter in advance and study it later without internet access.

For the team, offline support is not an extra feature. It is part of the basic assumption under which the product was designed.

“A learning app that becomes useless every time connectivity becomes unreliable is not really designed for many of the students we want to serve,” Asefa said.

2. Learn, practise and compete when connected

When a student is online, PrepX becomes a connected learning environment.

A student can move from a chapter explanation into flashcards, quizzes and worksheets, then see how the same concept has appeared in a real entrance examination.

PrepX currently includes 12 years of Natural and Social Science entrance papers with worked solutions, and students can search them by year or topic.

But the team also wants studying to be social.

PrepX includes XP, streaks and leaderboards, and its latest release adds public and private groups, group chat and student-to-student challenges.

A student can choose a subject or chapter, challenge a friend and compete by answering curriculum questions.

That competitive element is already showing up in student feedback.

“It offers a huge collection of questions ranging from easy to challenging, along with a leaderboard that makes learning more competitive and engaging,” Google Play reviewer Redi Belay wrote.

“The questions are well organized, and it actually makes studying enjoyable instead of feeling like a chore,” wrote another student, Munira Kadir. She added that the XP system and leaderboard kept making her solve “just one more question.”

For PrepX, that matters almost as much as the content itself.

The challenge is not only giving students material to study. It is making them want to return to it tomorrow.

3. An AI layer when the student needs more than content

The third layer is real-time AI.

Instead of giving students a blank chatbot and expecting them to explain what they are studying, PrepX gives its AI the context of the curriculum material already on the student’s screen.

The platform currently has focused AI experiences for learning a chapter, understanding a note and working through entrance-exam questions.

Its AI responses can be grounded in Ethiopian textbooks and cite the source material behind an answer.

“You shouldn’t have to copy an entire question into a generic chatbot, explain which grade you are in, explain which Ethiopian textbook you are using and then hope the answer matches your curriculum,” Asefa said. “The system should already understand that context.”

That is also why the company does not describe PrepX simply as a chatbot for students.

The AI is intended to be one layer of a larger learning system.

Beyond the entrance exam: teaching for understanding

Although university entrance preparation is one of PrepX’s most immediate use cases, Asefa says the larger goal is not to build a digital cram school.

The learning material inside PrepX is deliberately written from first principles.

Rather than beginning with definitions and formulas students are expected to memorize, lessons try to begin with an idea the student can already understand, build the concept step by step, and only then introduce the formal scientific language.

A chemistry lesson on conjugate acid-base pairs, for example, begins with two friends passing a ball between them: one gives it, the other receives it. The lesson then replaces the ball with a proton and gradually builds toward the formal definition of acids, bases and conjugate pairs.

That teaching philosophy runs throughout the platform.

PrepX uses analogies, visual explanations, worked examples and situations students can recognize from everyday life before moving toward abstraction and exam questions.

“We don’t want a student to remember a sentence because it might appear on an exam,” Asefa said. “We want them to reach the point where the idea feels almost obvious because they understand where it came from.”

The team believes this distinction matters especially in science.

When science is presented mainly as formulas, definitions and facts to reproduce on an examination, it can easily feel distant and unnecessarily difficult. PrepX wants students to encounter mathematics and science as ways of explaining things they already see around them.

The entrance examination therefore becomes an outcome of learning rather than the entire purpose of learning.

“Our immediate responsibility is to help students prepare well for the exam in front of them,” Asefa said. “But if all we accomplish is helping someone answer multiple-choice questions, we haven’t done enough. We want a student to understand something deeply enough that they become curious about the next question.”

That philosophy also influences how PrepX uses AI.

The goal is not simply to produce the shortest possible answer. The AI is expected to explain ideas at the student’s level, approach a difficult concept from another direction when necessary, connect it with what the student already knows and continue the conversation until the concept makes sense.

Ultimately, the company wants PrepX to help produce students who do more than perform well on an entrance examination — students who understand, question, experiment and enjoy learning.

The bigger goal: an AI agent for every student

The current product is only part of the original vision behind PrepX.

The longer-term goal is to give every student something closer to a personal learning agent.

An agent that understands what the student has studied.

What they repeatedly get wrong.

Which subjects they avoid.

What exam they are preparing for.

And what they should probably study next.

The aim is for these agents to eventually track a student’s progress, build individual study plans, prepare custom notes and practice material, schedule revision, send useful reminders and answer questions while maintaining a meaningful memory of the student’s learning history.

“What we ultimately want is not AI that waits until a student asks it a question,” Asefa said. “We want an agent that knows the student well enough to help them prepare before they even know what to ask.”

Some pieces of that direction already exist in PrepX — curriculum context, learning history, AI tutoring, practice, revision and notifications — while the company continues building toward a more deeply personalized system.

Students are noticing the product details

Early reviews of PrepX frequently mention something the team has spent considerable time on: the experience around the learning content, not simply the amount of content available.

“This app is simple, smooth, and genuinely useful. The interface is easy to navigate, and everything feels thoughtfully designed. It makes studying feel much more organized and manageable,” Khulood Samman wrote on Google Play.

“This app is the best and most useful educational app I’ve seen in Ethiopia,” wrote Shueybi Ibrahim.

Another reviewer, Eldana Samson, said using it made her feel like studying every day.

That reaction is intentional.

The small PrepX team has spent much of its development time on details that rarely appear in an AI demo: offline state, navigation, question organization, loading speed, study progression, interface design and how quickly a student can move between understanding something and practising it.

“We’ve spent one and a half years obsessing over experiences that sometimes look very small individually,” Asefa said. “But students experience the product as a whole. The AI can be brilliant, but if everything around it is frustrating, they simply won’t study with it.”

Built without grants or paid acquisition

PrepX has so far been bootstrapped.

Asefa founded the company and today works with a small team of two developers.

There has been no grant funding behind the product, and the team says it has not spent money on advertising to generate its first 1,700+ downloads.

Instead, the company has relied primarily on students discovering the product, recommending it to friends and sharing it within schools and student communities.

The approach has kept growth relatively modest, but it has also forced the team to focus heavily on whether students actually continue using the product once they install it.

PrepX’s name itself comes from the idea of “preparing for the unknown — X.”

For a Grade 12 student, that unknown may simply be the question waiting on the next page of the entrance examination.

The company’s ambition is to make sure they are prepared for it.

Opening PrepX to schools and partners

The next phase of PrepX is not intended to be built alone.

The startup is actively open to working with schools, education organizations, companies and sponsors interested in expanding access to the platform or experimenting with AI-supported learning in Ethiopian classrooms.

For schools, that could include using PrepX alongside classroom teaching, structured practice, entrance-exam preparation, student competitions, or working directly with academic leadership on how the product can support students.

For companies, NGOs or other sponsors, it could mean sponsoring access for students or schools that would otherwise be unable to pay, or supporting broader education initiatives built around the platform.

“We would love to work with anyone who shares the belief that Ethiopian students deserve access to world-class learning tools built around their own curriculum and their own realities,” Asefa said.

About PrepX

PrepX is an Ethiopian education technology startup founded by Habtamu Asefa.

The company is building an AI-powered learning platform for Grade 9–12 students studying the Ethiopian national curriculum and preparing for the university entrance examination.

PrepX combines curriculum-aligned notes, flashcards, quizzes, worksheets, more than 220,000 practice questions, 12 years of entrance examinations, offline learning, student competition and curriculum-grounded AI tutoring in a single Android application.

Website: https://prepx.temaribet.io

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.temaribet.prepx

Partnership inquiries: habtamu@temaribet.io