Gojimo, an app that helps U.K. high school students prepare for exams, has picked up a further $1.8 million in funding, bringing total raised by the 2013-founded startup to just over $3 million.
Investors in this round include father and son duo Robin and Saul Klein, Deborah Quazzo of GSV Advisors, seed-stage investment platform Firestartr, and the London Mayor’s London Co-Investment Fund. In addition, some of the money raised came via equity crowd funding platform CrowdBnk.
Previous backers of Gojimo include London VC Index Ventures, and JamJar Investments, the venture fund set up by the founders of Innocent Drinks.
“Students today use their mobile phones for everything, except their education. When revising for exams, they’re forced to rely on archaic resources that haven’t changed in centuries,” says Gojimo CEO George Burgess, who founded the startup after dropping out of Stanford.
“In fact, the two most popular ways to revise are still physical textbooks and past papers. We change that by delivering an extensive library of high quality assessment material to their mobile phone for free.”
The Gojimo app is available on iOS, Android and the web and offers thousands of curriculum-specific assessment items. The startup has also begun experimenting with premium content from major educational publishers, such as McGraw-Hill Education and Oxford University Press, available via in-app purchases.
In May — exam time in the U.K. — Burgess says 300,000 students used the app, representing more than 20 per cent of all GCSE and A Level students.
“We don’t have any serious competitors in the U.K.,” claims Burgess. “There is a lot of noise but few products of any quality. Some of the bigger publishers have tried their hand at mobile revision resources, but they’ve never understood apps. They don’t know how to market their products or understand freemium models.
“They also only tend to release a small amount of content through their apps, whereas we now offer over 180,000 revision questions, all with detailed explanations, written and fact-checked by subject experts. We cover every major GCSE and A Level subject.”