Social learning company Grockit announced today that it has raised a new round of strategic investment from Discovery Communications. In addition to the capital investment, which from what we’ve heard is about $20 million, the strategic investment from Discovery will also include shared technology, as well as marketing, distribution and promotional opportunities via Learnist, Grockit’s social… → Read More
Educational startup Grockit is expanding its reach today from social learning to streaming video. The startup has launched Grockit TV, a set of live courses to supplement its SAT and GMAT test prep service.
The courses are streamed live and also available as archives, but to encourage students to watch the live stream together (where they can interact via chat), the live stream of the course is… → Read More
Online learning site Grockit is scaling up its leadership team after raising $7 million last May. Today it is announcing that it is hiring Roy Gilbert as CEO. Gilbert is Google’s director of user operations and policy, in charge of many non-advertising operations. He helped set up Google’s India operations and grew it from 20 people to 1,000, and was the first business manager for… → Read More
Online learning startup Knewton has a new chief operating officer. David Liu, the former senior VP at AOL who spearheaded its Lifestreaming efforts and is also an angel investor (SimpleGeo, BlockChalk), is joining Knewton as COO and a member of the board of directors.
Knewton is an adaptive learning platform which raised a $12.5 million B round last April from Firstmark, Accel, Bessemer, First… → Read More
Online learning site Grockit, which launched at TechCrunch 50 in 2008, has integrated educational videos from YouTube EDU to enhance the learnings experience for its users.
Grockit is an online learning community that adds game mechanics to helping high school students prepare for standardized tests such as the GMAT and SAT. The startup, which just raised $7 million in funding, is also moving… → Read More
Online learning site Grockit raised another $7 million in a Series C financing today. Atlas Venture led the round, with existing investors Benchmark and Integral Capital participating. The last time Grockit raised money was an $8 million Series B in 2008.
Grockit is an online learning community that adds game mechanics to helping high school students prepare for standardized tests such as the… → Read More
Sitting across from Grockit CEO Farb Nivi, you’d never know that a few months ago he was spending weeks in the hospital and with tubes down his throat after getting hit by a minivan on his Vespa. One of his kidneys burst and half of it had to be removed. His recuperation was slow and painful, and it took a toll on his social learning startup as well. He lost some employees. Investors, who put… → Read More
Textbooks are so yesterday. Yet student backpacks are still weighed down by them. Replacing those textbooks with software has been one of the great white whales of computing going back at least to Alan Kay’s original Dynabook concept 40 years ago (which he is still working on). Today, there are a slew of startups tackling the problem of e-learning (Brightstorm, iKnow, Grockit, PrepMe), and some… → Read More
Three jam-packed days, and 52 startup demos later, we finally have a winner for this year’s TechCrunch50. Every day, the presentations just seemed to get stronger and stronger. There were so many strong contenders this year that we are awarding five jury selection prizes, in addition to the top prize. But there must be a winner, and that winner is…Yammer.
Grockit, the mysterious online learning site that has been operating in stealth for the past year and has raised a total of over $10 million, has finally revealed itself to the public, and it doesn’t disappoint. The site calls itself a “Massively Multi Player Online Learning Game”, taking gaming concepts that have made World of Warcraft a massive hit and applying it to what amounts to an online… → Read More
I feel like today is Virtual World Day. We started off the morning covering the public beta launch of Vivaty, then Second Life and IBM announced that they bridged two virtual worlds, and Google launched its own version of virtual worlds with Lively. If it seems like everybody is starting their own virtual world, it is because they are. A report put out today by Virtual Worlds Management tracks… → Read More
We don’t know much about Grockit. The company is creating a new way to get people to learn online, and has spent the last year working away in stealth mode. Whatever it is, it’s apparently impressing investors: Grockit just raised $8 million in Series B funding from Integral Capital and Benchmark Capital, bringing its total to $10.7 million – impressive for a product that has yet… → Read More
Anyone who’s applied to college has dealt with the frustration of standardize testing. With the cost of failure so high, parents and grads continue to spend a lot of cash on test preparation to ensure the best results. However, there’s a crop of web startups popping up to ease the pain and we’re all benefiting from the competition. Prepme is one online test prep company coming… → Read More
When we last wrote about San Francisco based Grockit, in late 2006, they were unfunded. Their business idea of holding low-cost GMAT prep courses over Webex was just getting off the ground. Now they are funded – $2.7 million total ($2.3 million from Benchmark, $400k from angel investors Mark Pincus, Rob Lord, Reid Hoffman Thomas Ryan and others) in a Series A round was closed last month. And… → Read More
Entrance exam preparation is costly and not exactly what I’d call fun. A company that launched on Monday called Grockit is dropping costs and making the process a bit easier to get through. Grockit was started by Farbood Nivi, who has been teaching exam preparation since 1998. He worked for Kaplan and was Teacher of the Year for The Princeton Review in 2002. Just a few months ago he decided… → Read More
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