Launching in the fall of last year as part of education accelerator Imagine K12’s third batch of startups, Securly set out to help K-12 schools across the U.S. prevent their bright young minds from being exposed to the not-so-savory side of the Internet. While the Web can be a powerful learning tool and source of educational content, schools protect their students from its Dark Side by limiting by blocking access to inappropriate sites and content.
Maintaining the wall between educational content and The Void is a challenging job and generally falls on the shoulders of already-overworked IT admins. Securly‘s developed cloud-based web filtering platform admins reduce the pain associated with the web filtering process, allowing them to manage student access, whitelisted and blacklisted sites and solve the “over blocking” problem without having to install any hardware or software.
Today, Securly is now working with IT admins at more than 200 schools in the U.S., Canada and the U.K., according to EdSurge, and looking to expand, the startup has raised $1 million in seed financing, led by Founder.org Chairman and CEO Michael Baum, with participation from NewSchools Venture Fund, Imagine K12 co-founder Geoff Ralston, as well as several professors from the Wharton School at UPenn.
To compete with enterprise web filtering solutions and boost the appeal for schools, Securly has streamlined its on-boarding process so that districts can be up and running “in five minutes,” the company says. It’s also hoping to reduce the potential barriers to entry by setting prices at $3/student/year and $10/user/year to use the service at home, which could make it an attractive alternative to more expensive enterprise alternatives.
Securly has also expanded admin roles within its platform so that teachers can now control which sites are blocked and which aren’t so that they can tweak settings themselves if a site ends up being blocked that shouldn’t.
The startup also claims to be the first web filtering option of its kind to integrate with Google Apps for Education and Chromebooks.
For more, find Securly at home here.