Top Hat, the mobile and web-based classroom response and engagement tool, today announced that it has raised a $10 million series B led by Georgian Partners, with participation from Emergence Capital Partners, iNovia Capital, SoftTech VC, Version One Ventures and Golden Venture Partners. With the exception of Georgian, all of the other investors in this round also participated in Top Hat’s $8 million Series A in July 2012.
Today’s round brings Top Hat’s total funding to $20 million. Its products are currently in use by about 300,000 students at more than 400 universities. Since launching in Canada in 2012, the company now has offices in San Francisco and Chicago, too.
The company plans to use this new round of funding to launch an enterprise product for university administrators in the near future. While the company isn’t saying much about this product, it did say that the idea behind these tools is to provide administrators with sentiment polls and an early warning system to help them identify students who are slacking off.
Instead of just getting feedback about a student’s performance at the end of the semester or quarter, tools like this could help administrators get a more holistic and almost real-time view of a student’s performance.
In addition to announcing this funding round, the company today launched a new version of its iPad app for professors, as well as updated versions of their iOS and Android apps. In addition, the company announced that it will soon bring its app for professors to Android as well, but it didn’t announce an ETA for when it plans to release this new app.