Numerade, a STEM learning platform, recently announced that it has raised $26 million in a Series A funding round led by IDG Capital, an investment firm based in Boston, Massachusetts.
Existing investors General Catalyst, Mucker Capital, and Kapor Capital, and strategic investors including Alumni Ventures Group, Interplay Ventures, Toy Ventures, Margo Georgiadis, Khaled Helioui, Taavet Hinrikus, Sten Tamkivi, Pierre-Dimitri, Ian Hogarth, and Michael Thompson also participated in the round.
According to its Co-founder and CEO Nhon Ma, Numerade was founded to provide the next generation of students with a better platform to enhance their studies and problem-solving skills. It focuses on creating exceptional video and interactive content experiences for education making the knowledge and skills of world-class educators widely accessible and affordable to students of all backgrounds.
Numerade’s mission is to close the educational opportunity gap by unlocking and democratizing access to extraordinary educators and the content they have to offer. By leveraging the world’s largest library of virtual STEM lessons, it provides students far and wide with access to the best educators that learning has to offer.
Since its launch, the Los Angeles-based company has helped over 20 million students with questions ranging from pre-algebra to quantum mechanics, saving them hundreds of millions of frustration, anxiety, and self-doubt. Numerade offers a library of more than one million handcrafted videos, covering more than 3,000 topics, through which students watch, listen, and learn difficult concepts and skills supported by expert explanations from top-notch, passionate educators.
Announcing the fundraise in a blog post, Nhon Ma said the funding will allow the company to support millions of students and educators across geographic and socioeconomic borders, providing personalized asynchronous lessons and experiences in parity with traditional learning. The co-founder also said that in addition to growing its video library, the company will invest in the further development of its proprietary Artificial Intelligence (AI) tutor technology, to give each learner the benefit of a personal tutor without paying exorbitant fees.
Nhon Ma further said that the already widening opportunity gap between lower and higher-income students has been significantly exacerbated by COVID-19 and the remote education which followed. Making the world’s most talented educators’ knowledge available at a fraction of the cost will help eliminate inequity in STEM fields and democratize access to top-tier education, he added.
