Online Education Startup Gets $33 Million in Funding

Educational technology startup Knewton announced Thursday that it had received $33 million in new venture capital funding as it rolls out an online education platform that can be adapted to each student’s needs.

The new stash, secured in Knewton’s forth round of funding, brings the total for the three-year-old company to $54 million and sets it on a path to rapid expansion.

“Knewton is poised to become a global lynchpin in online education and, more importantly, to improve education for everyone,” said Luke Nosek, Managing Partner of Founders Fund, who along with education publishing giant Pearson, led the Series D financing. “We couldn’t be more excited about our investment.”

So what makes Knewton unique from other e-learning companies out there?

For starters, the company has developed the world’s first Adaptive Learning Platform (patent pending), which they say “customizes educational content to create a uniquely personalized learning experience for every student.”

The innovative platform works by breaking up lessons into unique “building blocks” and then assessing the student’s performance while learning each section.

After analyzing how long a student works on a problem, whether they got the answer right or not, and how many videos they watched, the system then serves up the next bite-sized bit of online content that the student should learn next.

The result, according to Jose Ferreira, the company’s founder and CEO, is a personalized education for each student.

“There’s a revolution brewing in education,” Ferreira told Tech Crunch. “Between increased broadband and the rise of tablet computing, many more students are accessing their homework and even their classes online. In so doing they are producing unfathomable quantities of data. As the world leader in adaptive learning, Knewton can capture these data to give students a unique lifetime learning profile that dramatically improves their educational experience.”

According to COO David Liu, Knewton will use the $54 Million in secured funding to beef up its now 70-member staff over the next two years. In addition to hiring software engineers and data specialists to help speed its entry into more markets, including K-to-12 schools, it also intends to launch an open platform that publishers and others can use to power their digital offerings.

“We can say we’re not fringe anymore,” said Liu. “We think one day our technology will make its way into any set of courses delivered online.”

via WSJ