![]() Now Newsela is valued at $1 billion, a milestone that may be common among consumer apps like Instacart and Deliveroo but is still relatively rare for education apps aimed at American public schools. Last month, the start-up announced that it had raised $100 million. ”īy the end of December, schools were paying for 11 million student accounts on Newsela, an increase of about 87 percent from 2019. Once the school year ended, he said, ed-tech start-ups began trying to convert school districts into paying customers, and “we saw pretty broad-based uptake of those offers. “What unfolded from there was massive adoption,” said Tory Patterson, a managing director at Owl Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in education start-ups like Newsela. Then last spring, as school districts switched to remote learning, many education apps hit on a common pandemic growth strategy: They temporarily made their premium services free to teachers for the rest of the school year. “We are excited about these products that are really extending the capabilities of the classroom teachers.”Ī number of ed-tech start-ups reporting record growth had sizable school audiences before the pandemic. “Especially in K-12, so much of learning is sparked through dialogue between teachers and students,” said Jennifer Carolan, a partner at Reach Capital, a venture capital firm focused on education that has invested in Nearpod and Newsela. And Kahoot, a quiz app from Norway used by millions of teachers, recently raised about $215 million from SoftBank. ![]() Yuanfudao, another Chinese tutoring start-up, raised a total of $3.5 billion from investors like Tencent. “We will never again in our lifetime see a more powerful demonstration of the conservatism of educational systems,” said Justin Reich, an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies online learning and recently wrote the book “ Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education.”Īpps that enable online interactions between teachers and students are reporting extraordinary growth, and investors have followed.Īmong the biggest deals, CB Insights said: Zuoyebang, a Chinese ed-tech giant that offers live online lessons and homework help for students in kindergarten through 12th grade, raised a total of $2.35 billion last year from investors including Alibaba and Sequoia Capital China. Critics say that push to replicate the school day for remote students has only exacerbated disparities for many children facing pandemic challenges at home. Instead, during the pandemic, many schools simply turned to digital tools like videoconferencing to transfer traditional practices and schedules online.
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