Kai Song Eer

Kai Song Eer was only 18 when she built CollegeLAH, a non-profit social project helping underprivileged communities access tertiary education. The online platform reached over 200 youth in 2014. While pursuing her Master’s in Information Engineering with a focus on Machine Learning, Kai Song co-founded Rakan Tutor, a non-profit organisation offering free one-to-one tutoring to secondary school students from low-income households at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021. Rakan Tutor currently has over 500 volunteer tutors assisting students in 50 schools nationwide.

In the past, Kai Song worked at the top-tier management consulting firm McKinsey & Company in London where she helped clients with growth strategies in the UK, US, Middle East and Europe. She was also the Chief of Staff and the CEO of an Advanced Analytics startup in London. But with her technical foundation and passion for solving education inequalities in Malaysia, Kai Song returned home after spending many years in the UK.

Kai Song took it up a notch and harnessed data science to solve education inequalities with the creation of GuruLab in early 2022. The platform aims to improve the English proficiency of learners and seeks to address the shortcomings of teaching English in schools and tuition centres.

GuruLab recently secured a US$ 1 million (RM 4.3million) seed round investment from an investor who saw value in the initiative. Currently, GuruLab caters to roughly 200 students within the age range of 13 to 17 years old.

For more info on Rakan Tutor, click here.

My desire to drive change arises when I experience first-hand the issues that our community faces and see a gap that I can personally fill within my means. In the case of Rakan Tutor, I worked with many teachers over the pandemic and was disheartened to hear about the learning loss and the lack of access to remedial programs. I thought about the network I have and decided that we can collectively make a small impact on the wider problem.