Ambi’s vision is to disrupt higher education with a fresh take on how students engage with academic content and with each other using a simple, intuitive, and centralized Learner Engagement Platform
BOSTON – Ambi, the future of the student experience in higher education, has closed 2018 with $5 million in Series A funding and $1.5 million in Seed Round investment from San Francisco-based holding and advisory company Steigen LLC, Boston-based VC NXT Ventures, international early-stage fund Global Investment, and others. Ambi has also named Mark Blosil, an early luminary sales leader from Instructure (NYSE: INST), to the executive team as Senior Vice President of Sales.
Ambi is reinventing how learning takes place in higher education by putting students at the center of the experience: a Learner Engagement Platform designed for the student first, creating a more engaged, involved, and immersive learning experience for everyone. Ambi is the product of three years of research and more than eighteen months of development to build a Learner Engagement Platform where learning takes place without limits. The interface is as familiar as the social networks students use on a day-to-day basis, but with a tight integration to the course materials and features from Learning Management Systems like Canvas from Instructure, and Blackboard. It has also been built with student privacy and safety in mind, and fully compliant with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0.
“People’s behaviors have changed. So it’s time that the learning experience does, too,” said Saad El Yamani, Founder and CEO of ambi. “Thanks to our predecessors, we now have the luxury to move from feature-focused platforms to experience and behavior-based platforms.”
Unlike old learning management systems that fail to connect, engage or facilitate collaboration for students, Ambi behaves and feels like an organic social community. It’s where students come together to learn and access their class materials and resources, but with the added benefit of it being their private and productive social network for college. “Ambi benefits everyone involved in the learning experience by meeting student needs first. When all students are empowered to succeed, everyone wins,” said El Yamani.
Comments from Sandesh Tuladhar from the Ivy-League school, Columbia University, align with El Yamani’s vision. “There’s no question that the student learning experience has continued to lag behind in the educational technology field compared to other technology and service verticals,” said Sandesh Tuladhar, Assistant Provost of Online Education at Columbia University. “But ambi takes a fresh, new approach by putting the student learning experience front and center by design, and has focused on three key features, productivity, communication, and network, in a user-friendly manner that makes being productive and forming communities playful and engaging.”
It will take a bold approach to reimagine the learning environment and prepare students for the 21st century jobs. Ambi aims to be that bold, global leader with its centralized, digital learning platforms for lifelong learning from college prep to higher education.
