Education

Sequoia India eyes $50 million investment in K12 despite market slump • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 25, 2022Posted in Asia, edtech, Education, india, Sequoia India, Startups, VentureNo Comments

Sequoia India is in advanced stages of deliberations to invest over $50 million in K12 Techno Services, a startup that offers a range of services to education institutions and also runs its own chain of schools, doubling down on a firm that it first backed over a decade ago, two sources familiar with the matter told ZebethMedia. K12 Techno Services — which has raised over $75 million in previous rounds, according to Tracxn — also engaged with TPG and Accel in recent weeks but has decided to move ahead with existing backer Sequoia India, one of the sources said. The round hasn’t closed, so the terms of the investment may change, sources cautioned, requesting anonymity sharing nonpublic information. It’s unclear if anyone other than Sequoia is also investing in the round. K12 Techno Services runs Orchids – The International School chain in over two dozen cities in India. It operates over 90 schools where it teaches a range of subjects from robotics to philosophy for an individual’s “360-degree development.” Orchids has served over 75,000 students, according to its website. It also offers integrated curriculum, platform for online classes, and other school management applications to over 300 schools through its arm called Let’s Eduvate. “Our comprehensive solutions are scale-able and adaptable that work effectively for all types of schools. They are efficacious for various school management activities as designed for the overall growth of students, hence for schools,” it describes on its website. Sparkle Box, another arm of K12, runs an e-commerce store for custom-made activity kits aimed at children. K12 didn’t respond to a request for comment Thursday, whereas Sequoia India declined to comment. The deal represents Sequoia’s aggressive and multi-faceted approach to tackling the edtech market in India, where over 300 million students go to school and participate in competitive college entrance exams. It’s one of the earliest backers of Byju’s, Unacademy and Doubtnut that serve students from kindergarten to those preparing to enter colleges. It’s also an investor in Eruditus, which offers higher education to students in dozens of markets. Edtech startups in India — and beyond — are some of the most impacted by the ongoing market downturn that has reversed much of the gains made in the 13 years long bull run. The edtech industry in the South Asian market has cut nearly 5,000 jobs this year.

Revyze is building the TikTok of educational videos • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Apps, edtech, Education, France Newsletter, Revyze, StartupsNo Comments

Meet Revyze, a French startup that is developing a mobile app for iOS and Android at the intersection of education and social. In many ways, Revyze looks just like TikTok. But it is focused specifically on educational content for teenagers. “We talked with kids attending 30 or 35 different high schools,” co-founder Florent Sciberras told me. “We asked them: ‘What do you think about school and what’s the best way to learn?’ And they told us that nobody had ever asked them those questions.” In hindsight, the answer was quite simple and obvious. They said that they would rather learn from their friends than their teachers. “They said ‘because they talk like us and they are like us,’” Sciberras said. And that’s probably the reason why educational videos are so popular on YouTube and TikTok — the hashtag #LearnOnTikTok is massively popular for instance. But there is an issue with mainstream social platforms. They aren’t designed specifically for education. If you watch an interesting video on TikTok, the social app might recommend something completely different when you skip to the next video. You end up jumping from math to dancing cat to physics to magic tricks… Revyze aims to be the TikTok of education — a commmunity-powered app with a sharp focus on high school education. Essentially, Revyze wants to unbundle education videos from TikTok — a very large social platform — so that they get the attention they deserve. At first, the Revyze team focused on France’s baccalauréat, the exam that you have to pass at the end of high school. They built a quick version of the app, put together a Discord community to spread the word and shared a few videos on TikTok and Instagram. In just a few weeks, Revyze managed to attract 35,000 downloads. They reached the #2 spot in the top free apps of the App Store — right behind Doctolib. Image Credits: Revyze This summer, Revyze raised a $2 million pre-seed round (€2 million) from more than a hundred business angels, such as Nate Blecharczyk, Jean-Charles Samuelian, Charles Gorintin, Mathilde Collin, Lenny Rachitzky, Thomas France, Julia Bijaoui, Roxanne Varza, Arion (Jacques Attali’s fund), Olivier Dacourt, Varsha Rao and others. firstminute Capital, Kima Ventures, AirAngels, Nomad Capital and Ligature VC also invested. Now, the company wants to turn this small experiment into a massive social/education app. “Our goal is to reach 500,000 users by the end of the year and to expand to the U.S. within 6 to 12 months,” co-founder Guillaume Perrot told me. Building the community behind the app So what does Revyze feel like? When you open the app, you get a TikTok-like feed of videos. These videos fill the entire screen and you can skip to the next video with a simple swiping gesture. There’s a three-minute limit on video length. On the second tab, you can explore the video library more granularly. You can select a topic, such as math or literature, and even select a chapter in the syllabus. Revyze started with French high school students in their final year and is progressively expanding to other grades. And because we are talking about educational content, Revyze is paying close attention to the videos that are uploaded to the app. When a user submits a video, it isn’t instantly live on the platform. “Videos are validated by us and by the community,” Perrot said. “We want to make sure that it’s high-quality content, that it’s accurate and that it isn’t off-topic. Eventually, there will be a peer moderation system and after that we will add a bit of machine learning.” What do you get when you post on Revyze? A warm fuzzy feeling. In more technical term, you amass reward points just like on Stack Overflow. These reward points are called EDU. You get 20 points when you post a video, and you get one point when someone thanks you for the video. Some teens post videos because explaining a concept is the best way to know for sure that they understand it perfectly well. Others want to climb the leaderboard. In the long-term, if web3 is more than just a fad, Revyze could also turn EDU into a currency to reward the community for their contributions. But that’s not the next item on the roadmap. Up next, Revyze is going to expand to more countries and more educational systems. There are also a ton of opportunities when it comes to personalizing the app for each user. Revyze plans to algorithmically sort videos so that they are relevant to your level and your way of learning — an algorithm with a focus on learning outcomes instead of watch time. This way, users should waste less time skipping videos to they find relevant content. “We aren’t a social network,” Sciberras said. “Our goal is that you should spend as little time as possible in the app to learn as much as possible.” Image Credits: Revyze

With over 43M K-12 users, Adobe Express for Education gets new AI and safe search tools • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 17, 2022Posted in Adobe, Adobe Express, Apps, EducationNo Comments

Adobe Express, the company’s template-centric tool for helping anyone quickly create logos, banners, flyers, ads and more, has always long offered a free version for schools. As the company announced today — one day before its annual MAX conference — Adobe Express for Education now has over 43 million K-12 users globally. With over 43M K-12 users, Adobe Express for Education gets new AI and safe search tools In case you’re confused about the naming here, it’s worth remembering that Adobe Express was originally called Creative Cloud Express, which itself was a rebranded and updated edition of Adobe Spark. Image Credits: Adobe As part of today’s announcement, the company is also launching a number of new features for Adobe Express for Education. It now features the company’s context-aware AI-powered templates that make it easier for non-designers to create more professional-looking content. The feature evaluates your pre-made content (text, images, etc.) and then recommends relevant templates. There is now also a new font recommendation tool that uses the overall context of a project to recommend appropriate fonts from the company’s Adobe Font service. Maybe most importantly, though, the company also today introduced safe image and video searches and customized K-12 and higher education resource pages. Yet while all of this AI magic is surely cool, I can’t help but wonder if it doesn’t stifle students’ imaginations a bit. It’s surely useful for teachers, but I don’t think anybody’s expectation of a third-grader should be to be able to produce an AI-enhanced flyer for her science fair project. It’s been a long time since I stood before a classroom, though, so maybe that’s changed. “I taught my fifth graders how to use Adobe Express, and they created culminating projects about how to carefully evaluate information found on the web,” said Linda Dickinson, Media and Educational Technology Instructor, Abbotts Hill Elementary School. “They loved sharing what they learned using Express! It allowed them to showcase their creativity and share what they felt was most important, authentically.”