Firas Jabbour and the school day behind the school day

A school can survive a dull assembly. A missing timetable is another matter. Firas Jabbour has spent much of his working life on the less photogenic side of education: the records, schedules, messages and payments that allow a school to get through Tuesday. His career keeps returning to a deceptively modest question. How much easier could learning become if the machinery around it worked together?

Jabbour is the co-founder and CEO of Edunation, based personally in Dubai and working in a business with roots across the region. The company dates its founding to 2013. Its ambition has expanded from a learning environment to an operating system for schools. That phrase can sound grand until you consider the customer: an institution in which a lesson, an invoice and a message home may all concern the same child.

There is a useful way to read his story. Follow the administrative problems. They appear early, recur in later ventures and eventually turn up in a partnership about paying school fees. The technology changes. The object of his attention remains remarkably familiar.

Before the operating system, the timetable

In December 2005, Jabbour founded Top Group Solution Source. Its products included Top School, a web application covering educational administration, and Livetop, a platform for learning, reporting and sharing knowledge. Scheduling and exams sat beside communication. These were school problems with several owners, each needing access to a different piece of the same information.

The product names have a pleasing lack of mystery. Top School meant schools; Livetop concerned learning. Underneath them was a more persistent idea: educational work could be organised through a shared web environment. This gives Jabbour's later career a longer runway than the Edunation founding date alone suggests. He had already been working on the institution around the classroom.

Top Group subsequently ceased operating in June 2021. Its place in his career matters because it establishes continuity of interest, without requiring a tidy story about how one company became another. Scheduling, reporting and communication were already in his professional vocabulary years before Edunation's expansion.

There is a distinction between teaching a subject and running the organisation in which it is taught. His early product choices sit at that boundary. They concern the handoff: from a schedule to an exam, from a result to a report, from a report to the people who need to read it. Following those handoffs makes the later business easier to understand.

A small village, a regional business

Jabbour came from a small village and co-founded Edunation with a mission to address gaps in education. That starting point gives a human scale to a career now expressed in countries, users and software modules. A village and a regional platform belong to very different orders of magnitude.

He co-founded Edunation with Mahmud Gabareen, the company's technology leader. The division of titles is straightforward: Jabbour as CEO, Gabareen as CTO. It is worth keeping both names in view. A school software business needs a working product and an organisation capable of getting it adopted; the founding partnership brought those responsibilities into the same company.

By 2015, Jabbour was listed among the speakers at DLD in Munich. The appearance places him in an international technology conversation early in Edunation's life. It also supplies a useful marker between the company's founding and the regional expansion that followed. This was a business being taken beyond its immediate setting.

Twelve people, several kinds of school

In 2018, Edunation joined THE NEXT SOCIETY community. Its team numbered 12, with Jabbour as founder and CEO, and its software was designed for multiple languages, campuses and curricula. Those details say more about the work than a generic promise to digitise education.

A campus is a physical distinction. A curriculum is an academic one. A language shapes how people can actually use the product. Serving all three means accommodating differences inside the institution, rather than assuming that every school is a copy of the first customer. The combination captures that complexity while the team was still small.

It is an instructive snapshot of Jabbour's business. The ambition was already broader than putting a lesson on a screen. A school contains overlapping groups of people and obligations. Edunation was positioning itself to handle their connections. Even in a digital school, somebody has to know which class belongs where. That practical requirement gives the software a purpose people can understand without learning the language of the technology industry first.

The money arrived in chapters

The funding history came in stages. Angel investor Dr Abdul Malek Al Jaber backed Edunation in 2014 and again in 2019. In June 2021, a $3 million round led by Rubix gave the company another source of capital. The sequence shows years between investments, with a founder continuing to build through each interval.

The 2021 expansion plan was geographically specific. Edunation wanted to strengthen its position in Jordan, Palestine, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, while moving further into Egypt, Oman and Bahrain. Capital was being assigned to a regional business with existing customers and named markets.

Jabbour also emphasised recruiting local talent for a data-science division. The company intended to develop its AI work, following a beta released in mid-2020. For a founder, that is a revealing use of investment: people who can build the next layer of the product. A funding announcement lasts a day. Hiring commits the business to what happens afterward.

“business growth, customer success, and developing new tools”

Firas Jabbour, describing where the team could focus with infrastructure support, 2021

Growth has to fit through the server

Edunation's expansion also produced a technical test. By June 2021, it had handled activity reaching up to 32 times its earlier level. User growth was reported at 1,200 percent. These measure different things: people using a service and the work those people ask it to perform. A founder has to answer for both.

The team used cloud infrastructure to absorb the load. Jabbour described expert support as freeing attention for customers and product development. There is an unglamorous executive decision inside that observation: decide which work the company should own and which work a specialist can carry. Every hour spent keeping infrastructure running is an hour unavailable for something else.

For school software, reliability belongs close to the product's purpose. Teachers and administrators need the system when their work is happening. The scale figures describe an engineering achievement; their practical significance is continuity. A platform becomes useful through repeated access, including the mornings when everyone happens to need it at once.

The invoice belongs in the story

In December 2024, Edunation announced a partnership with Ottu to integrate payment services. The work included regional payment gateways, payment links and recurring payments. Jabbour's explanation centred on making fee collection easier and giving parents more convenient ways to pay.

This is the sort of announcement that can look peripheral in a technology founder's biography. It belongs near the centre of this one. Jabbour's company had been bringing academic and administrative functions together; payments carried that logic into another everyday encounter between a school and a family. The bursar, it turns out, is part of the educational ecosystem too.

The partnership also shows a practical route to expansion: connect with a specialist already working on the local problem. Regional payment methods matter because families use them. A platform's usefulness depends partly on whether it fits those ordinary habits. Convenience is a modest word for something people notice immediately when it is absent.

A school with fewer loose ends

Today, Edunation describes a platform of 18 connected applications with shared student information and identity. Its published reach exceeds one million users across ten countries. Those are company figures, and they locate the scale at which Jabbour now works. The early concerns about coordination have grown into a much larger product architecture.

The shared foundation includes users, groups, courses, timetables, permissions and communication. These are the recurring nouns of his earlier work, now treated as services beneath a suite of applications. That structure helps explain the operating-system language. A classroom tool can solve one task well; a school platform has to consider what happens when the task crosses a departmental boundary. Jabbour’s company is making that crossing part of its product design. The ambition carries an obligation, too. Bringing more of an institution into one environment gives a founder more kinds of everyday work to understand. The product must remain intelligible to people whose job titles, priorities and reasons for signing in differ.

One application, ACTUS, addresses inspection preparation through academic data, dashboards and recommendations. Jabbour has publicly argued for ongoing visibility rather than waiting for annual evaluation. It is a specific expression of the same instinct visible earlier in his career: information should be useful while there is still time to act on it.

His work now touches the registrar, teacher, finance team and parent. The ambition is to let their separate tasks draw on a connected institutional record. Whether the immediate task is an assessment or a payment, the underlying question keeps its shape: can the people involved get what they need without rebuilding the connection themselves?

There is something quietly funny about building an ambitious technology company around the hope that its customers will spend less time thinking about technology. Yet that is where Jabbour's career has led. The timetable should be available. The message should arrive. The fee should be payable. Then the school can get on with its day.