AI reading coach startup Ello raises $15M to bolster child literacy

Ello aims to eradicate childhood illiteracy by leveraging artificial intelligence and child speech recognition technology. The startup announced today that it secured $15 million in Series A financing to help it do so, and the funding will go toward product development and expanding access to consumers. “Ello is one of those great companies,” Coddy Johnson, […]

Go1 snaps up speed reading app Blinkist to expand in enterprise learning

After raising $100 million at a valuation of over $2 billion last year, the Australian ed-tech startup Go1 is making an acquisition and getting some investment to expand its reach and technology to serve the market of corporate online learning.

First, it is snapping up Blinkist, a startup out of Berlin that had built a platform to discover and read abbreviated versions of longer non-fiction books — “Blinks” that typically take no more than 15 minutes to read or listen to.

Second, while financial terms of the acquisition are not being disclosed by the two companies, but we have confirmed other details with Go1’s co-CEO and founder Andrew Barnes: the acquisition is a mix of cash and shares. And it will also involve Blinkist’s biggest investor, Insight Partners, taking an additional $30 million in equity in Go1 at an “upround,” but again with the exact numbers not being discussed.

The two platforms will continue to operate separately but over time, the plan is for more integration and cross-selling between the two, the companies said. It will also be working to bring newer currents in technology to bear on the wider platform, such as the incorporation of more AI into Blinkist’s text-summarization process, and — tapping Blinkist’s app format — providing a wider range of options for delivering courses to Go1 users.

“B2B has been our bread and butter, something Blinkist had just started moving into,” Barnes said in an interview. But on the other hand, he noted that “Blinkist has very high user engagement,” something Go1 wants to improve in its app. “We worked out last year that what we want to do they’d already done, and we’d done what they wanted to do.”

Blinkist has had 25 million downloads of its app and has just under 1 million paying users, including some 1,500 companies. Go1 — which is backed by the likes of Salesforce and Microsoft, but also Softbank — says that it has 8 million users, with big customers including Delta, Hays, Westpac and energy giant EDF, using its e-learning platform, which provides a curated catalog of training and professional development courses, tens of thousands in all.

Blinkist’s last valuation was $160 million in 2018, when it raised $18.8 million and the company is “significantly bigger” than it was then, Barnes said.

The reason Blinkist hasn’t gone out for funding again in the last five years is because it has’t had to: the company is growing and profitable, and it still has money left in the bank, according to Holger Seim, Blinkist’s CEO and co-founder. It had raised just over $37 million, per Pitchbook data, with backers in addition to Insight including Left Lane Capital, T-Ventures, and more. 

The Berlin startup has had a range of potential acquirers knocking on its door over the years, Seim said in a separate interview. Blinkist’s catalog is a mix of text-based and audio content, making it an interesting asset for tech companies, publishers or media brands that have tried to build out bigger e-book operations, business user strategies or even larger media holdings for both in areas like podcasting.

“But there was never something before Go1 that looked like a great fit,” Seim said.

Blinkist and Go1 are sitting in areas that will be worth watching over the coming years, in particularly because of how — or if, if you’re more skeptical — they will be disrupted with advances in areas like AI.

One camp would have you believe that both e-learning and reading (and in particular reading summaries) will be overturned as generative AI grows stronger. Personalization will produce content tailor-made to the specific needs of people, whether that’s in terms of what they need to learn, or want to learn, or have time to learn.

Seim is far from concerned about this, though. “We see generative AI as a big opportunity,” he said. He noted that even before the release of ChatGPT, “you could find a summary of a book by Googling. Key insights have always been a commodity.”

But there is still something missing in those takes, he continued. “We’re not a library but a smart companion to make learning part of your life. Content needs to be engaging and entertaining and you need to be recommended the right thing at the right time to keep you going. There is more than the content itself.”

AI is already being used by Blinkist to build recommendation algorithms, but in the future, it could aid the startup’s very-human workforce of people who are building summaries, by helping them work faster and at a lower cost. The startup is already piloting elements of this, he said. “We just need to make sure that GPT can work at scale,” adding that this hasn’t been foolproof so far.

Given Blinkist’s status as profitable and growing, this deal is not likely a part of the M&A trend we’ve seen in technology in the last six months or so, where there has been an uptick of smaller deals as a wave of startups have come to the end of their funding runways and found conditions too challenging to raise more money. What it does open up though are questions of what the next step for the bigger Go1 will be.

Backed by Softbank’s Vision Fund in its halcyon days, the market for funding and exits for later-stage and larger technology companies has been quite tough in the last six months. Barnes said that an IPO was part of the long-term plan but that “it’s not something we are targeting right now.”

Go1 snaps up speed reading app Blinkist to expand in enterprise learning by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch

Melbourne-based edtech startup Vivi raises $20M to accelerate overseas expansion in race to reach 1M classrooms

Australian edtech start-up Vivi has raised $20 million from education investor Quad Partners, funds that it intends to use to improve its platform, upgrade its operational infrastructure, and hire more sales and marketing teams in the Americas, Europe, and Asia.

This latest round sees Vivi reach $24.3 in total capital over five years, after it raised $4.3 million last year from New-York’s Riverside Acceleration Capital (RAC) and a syndicate of Australian investors.

The new investment will help the startup to accelerate its overseas expansion across the world with a focus on the United States, the country with the highest percentage of educators using one-to-one computing (1:1) computing.

One-to-one computing refers to academic institutions like schools and colleges, which allow all enrolled students to use electronic devices to access the internet, digital course materials, and digital textbooks.

Using Vivi, tutors can display their teaching material including videos and exercises to students, who then have the ability to annotate the content with their own notes on their own devices. Its other features include digital signage, emergency broadcasts, formative assessment, as well as student health and wellbeing checks.

The US, thus, remains a rich market for edtech companies like Vivi, which offers wireless presentation and screen mirroring technology to over 40,000 classrooms around the world, with the plan of reaching one million learning spaces in the next five years.

“Vivi has created demand overseas in a way that’s pretty unique – and largely by word of mouth. The company has evolved from a point solution into a comprehensive student engagement platform that has proven to be incredibly sticky,”said Vivi founder and executive chairman, Dr. Lior Rauchberger.

“Our next big goal is to be in a million classrooms as soon as possible and partnering with Quad will certainly speed that up,” he said.

In particular, the US remains attractive to Vivi as it offers a market comprising nearly 14,000 school districts, with over 130,000 K-12 schools, and over 5,000 universities and colleges.

Additionally, and as a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic, there is unprecedented federal funding in the US going into education, increasing the number of students with laptops, tablets and phones. This is as hybrid learning maintains a growing presence across the country.

“…right now, we are moving quickly to take advantage of some significant tailwinds, particularly in the US. With a rapidly increasing focus on technology enablement at schools, the highest ratio of 1:1 student devices ever, and increasing awareness of the instructional and administrative benefits of screen mirroring, we are thrilled to be able to get Vivi into the hands of more students, educators, and administrators quickly,” said Vivi’s chief executive officer, Natalie Mactier of their expansion plans.

Vivi was launched in 2016 as a simple and intuitive classroom engagement that enables students to instantly share their screens with the class or small groups for immediate feedback. The advent of the startup, however, goes back to 2013, as Australian entrepreneur Dr. Lior Rauchberger sought a wireless presentation solution for a client.

Unable to find one that was cost-effective compatible with all devices, he set out to innovate, and three years later, Vivi was born as a partnership between Dr. Rauchberger, startup specialist Simon Holland and tech guru Tomas Spacek from Papercloud Ventures.

So far, Vivi is in 12 countries spanning Australia, Europe, Middle East, South East Asia and the Americas.

In its international expansion, Vivi is contesting challengers like Airtame, Eupheus, Coorpacademy and Droplr, all being part of a global edtech market that is set to increase by USD 112.39 billion from 2020 to 2025, 46% of which will originate from North America.