Cramster, a top provider of online homework aid, has raised $6 million in Series B funding from Primera Capital. The web service currently boasts 200,000 active members but hopes to triple that figure over the next 12 months with new product offerings. Cramster specializes in homework help for quantitative subjects, like geometry and chemistry, but plans to launch new tools for the humanities starting next month. It’s an ambitious plan, but Cramster’s co-founder, Robert Angarita, says it’s on a solid trajectory: revenues have doubled every year for the past two years.
“We took this funding to widen the gap and solidify our position as the leader in the field,” Angarita says.
Founded in 2003, Cramster has raised a total of $9 million, including a $3 million Series A funding round in 2008 (led by investor Shai Reshef). The site, which competes with TutorVista and Global Scholar, provides homework help through several platforms, you can post questions to a community of experts, sift through a database of study guides, lecture notes and practice exams, form or join a study group and review interactive step-by-step textbook solutions. The community of experts, which includes retired professors, teacher assistants, professionals, peers, etc., receive a small monetary incentive to contribute. Experts accumulate points for their answers and those points can be redeemed for rewards, for example an Amazon gift card or electronics.
While many resources are free, the site includes a mix of paid content. Surprisingly, the conversion rate from free to pay user is relatively high, well in the double digits, according to a source.
Angarita says Cramster is preparing for a period of high growth with the upcoming introduction of humanities resources (a potentially larger market than the quantitative field). Because the vast majority of college students are concentrated in the humanities– not math and science– there should be a significant opportunity for Cramster to capture that market. Currently 90% of the site’s active users are college students, only 10% are at the high school level.
