Schoology, the learning management system that focuses on cloud collaboration, has today announced the close of a $32 million Series D financing led by JMI Equity, with participation from existing investors including FirstMark Capital, Intel Capital and Great Road Holdings.
Schoology was founded back in 2009 and has pressed through the education sector’s slow pace of innovation to bring a product to market that can truly help students and teachers.
Starting with K12, but rapidly expanding in higher education, Schoology lets teachers create curricula on the platform and share it with students. But beyond that, Schoology’s content is all in the cloud, across 12 million users in more than 130 countries, meaning teachers can share their courses and materials with other teachers. Moreover, third parties can build applications on top of Schoology, preventing students and parents from having a dozen log-ins to various pieces of software for each of their classes.
“We are seeing that teachers want to offer more and more personalized content to their students,” said co-founder and CEO Jeremy Friedman. “With Schoology, teachers are able to assess students’ progress through quizzes and assign personalized coursework (from Schoology’s vast library of content) to help that student through parts they find challenging.”
Schoology makes money by offering two products. The first is actually a free product for the individual teacher, whether it’s a K12 teacher, a professor at a college or someone who is homeschooling. That teacher is allowed to create courses and share those courses with students.
On the other side, there is an enterprise-grade product meant for school districts and universities, that gives richer functionality to administrators to hook into back-end student information systems, build out campuses and building maps, and far more. Schoology said that the price (which is per student, per year) is scaled down for larger clients, but he wouldn’t share the general price range for Schoology Enterprise.
Schoology says it has more than 1,000 enterprise clients, including the recent addition of the Los Angeles Unified School District (the second largest in the country), which is bringing the technology platform to more than 1,000 schools. The country of Uruguay has also adopted the platform nationwide.
Schoology has raised a total of $57 million across four rounds. If you want to learn more, check out the Schoology website here.