Boston’s LearnLaunch Unveils First Batch, As EdTech Accelerators Continue To Proliferate
Startup accelerators have gone “niche” over the last year. Instead of simply copy and pasting the Y Combinator model ad nauseam, incubators have started to seep into verticals, tailoring their programs to particular industries. Education technology has been enjoying more attention from entrepreneurs and investors of late, and following suit, a new generation of EdTech accelerators have begun to pop up across the country.
Even some of the oldest names in educational publishing, like Kaplan and Pearson, have been hopping on the bandwagon. Earlier this year, Boston became the latest city to get its own dedicated EdTech accelerator with the launch of LearnLaunchX, founded by the organizers of an education conference that goes by the same name (without the “X”).
The accelerator, along with fellow Boston-based accelerator Exponential Boston, are on a mission to help further Boston’s development as a startup ecosystem and help turn Beantown into the capital of the EdTech movement. The program itself has a similar composition to most accelerators: Selected founding teams take part in a three-month residential program in Boston, where they’re exposed to other entrepreneurs hacking away on their EdTech ideas, attend weekly meetings with mentors, advisors and experts and work their way through the accelerator’s “curriculum” (i.e. workshops).
Companies spend the first month, according to LearnLaunch, testing their assumptions and developing plans and during the second month they begin working more closely with their mentors on “company-specific issues, such as customer interaction, user interface design and product development.” Founding teams then spend the third month developing an action plan for launching their product and raising money.
For participating in this EdTech Bootcamp, startups receive roughly $18K in seed funding, along with four months of office space, mentorship, hosting (from AWS) and strategic support. In sum, LearnLaunch says that it will be providing $350K to its first batch of startups.
And to that point: This week marked the launch of the Boston EdTech accelerator’s inaugural batch. Eight startups were chosen to participate in LearnLaunch’s first class, which will run through the summer with a “Demo Day” planned for September.
Below you’ll find a brief introduction to the first eight startups to join LearnLaunch. More at LearnLaunchX’s website here. Let us know what you think.
Intellify Learning: Developed by LearnLaunchX entrepreneur-in-residence Chris Vento, former CTO of Blackboard, WebCT and Cengage, these guys are still in stealth mode. So, for now, all we know is that Intellify wants to “provide a standards-based instrumentation framework for online course developers and schools, curriculum and learning designers, and ed tech application developers” … and that its “cloud-delivered data and analytics” aim to help schools refine online learning experiences.