Online grading platform LearnBoost has raised $975,000 in seed funding from an impressive roster of venture capital firms and angel investors including Bessemer Venture Partners, Charles River Ventures, RRE Ventures, Atlas Ventures, Othman Laraki, Bill Lee, James Hong, Naval Ravikant and Karl Jacob.
LearnBoost offers teachers an easy-to-use, web-based gradebook. The startup’s software allows for real time collaboration around grades between teachers and parents. But LearnBoost is also trying to create a realtime CRM-type of application for teachers. A LearnBoost gradebook account allows teachers to essentially manage their classroom in one place by keeping track of student grades, tracking attendance, maintaining schedules, importing Google calendars, creating and managing lesson plans and curriculum, tagging standards to assignments and lesson plans, and more. The app is still in private beta and will be released to the public in August.
And LearnBoost operates under a freemium model, allowing bootstrapped schools to access the application for free without dipping into school budgets. As technology increasingly becomes a part of the learning process, applications like LearnBoost will be useful to educational institutions. Because LearnBoost, which is housed in DogPatch Labs’ San Francisco location, is more than just an online grading system, it’s sure to become popular amongst teachers looking to have a centralized place to manage their classrooms.
LearnBoost faces competition from Engrade, MyGradebook and others.