Ed tech used to be a sleepy industry. A few big players and change was slow. But things couldn’t be more different in 2014. Ed tech is HOT. More than $13B was spent on ed tech in 2013 and the VC world is paying attention and they invested $1billion into education companies last year.
We’re happy to announce that Echo360 and our Active Learning Platform has caught the eye of some great names in the investment community. We closed $18M in Series C growth capital from Duchossois Capital Management, a private family office, SWaN & Legend and CNF Investments. Revolution Growth, our existing investor, also signed on with this current round of funding. You can learn more in today's Wall Street Journal.
So why did we go for more funding now? The simple answer is above: Growth.
Our CEO Fred Singer said, “With our next generation platform just launched, we now have the necessary funding to achieve our goal of having thousands of universities and tens of millions of students having the advantage of our technology.”
The new Active Learning Platform stretches over four technology categories: lecture capture, content management, student engagement and learning analytics. It is completely SaaS-based – an elegant and easy-to-use solution that is deployed by industry leader Amazon Web Services.
Active learning is a teaching and learning necessity for today’s tech-savvy student. Research shows active learning can skyrocket participation rates to levels to as high as 99% of students, while increasing test scores by as much as 5 percentage points.
But many institutions – especially those under 10,000 students - lack the technical acumen or campus-wide resources to implement and manage a solution like the Active Learning Platform. This new capital will allow us to help our clients get the Active Learning Platform into the hands of even more students and instructors on more campuses – faster, simpler and more affordably than ever. We will continue to invest in new features, but we’ll also spend time on the services required to make them a success.
It’s been an exciting ride since our last funding round in 2012 – we acquired two new companies and launched the Active Learning Platform with lots of learning and valuable input from our customers along the way. But it’s just the beginning. With a new round of funding, the best and brightest employees and a vast client base dedicated to innovation in teaching and learning, we’re barreling full-speed ahead in our journey to ensure that more instructors and students around the globe can realize the benefits of active learning!
