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Gradescope Raises $2.75M to Speed Up Grading in Higher Ed

Students may feel relief as they hand in an

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Students may feel relief as they hand in an exam, but the moment marks the beginning of stress and anxiety for instructors and teaching assistants, who may need to grade hundreds of tests in a short time. Arjun Singh knows the feeling well. While earning a PhD in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, Singh was one of a handful of teaching assistants tasked with grading—by hand—hundreds of computer science exams throughout a semester. The trained programmer knew there had to be a more efficient way. And so he began building a prototype for an automated online grading tool that today has grown into his company, Gradescope. Today, Gradescope announced that it has raised $2.75 million in a funding round led by Reach Capital. GSV AcceleraTE and Ironfire Ventures also participated, as well as the startup’s existing investors K9 Ventures, Freestyle Capital and Bloomberg Beta.

(Palo Alto) June 24, 2020 —

Create & Learn …

While the pace of layoffs might be

Degreed lands new ca …

Intellispark, an education

Intellispark Secures …

Pluralsight pops mor …

Pluralsight is having a pretty good day in

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Pluralsight is having a pretty good day in its debut as a public company, with its shares popping more than 30% after its first trade following its IPO. There’ll be a little bit of debate as to whether Pluralsight might have left some money on the table in its IPO after raising its price last night above its original target range. After looking at a range between $12 and $14 per share, the company settled on $15 in an IPO that would raise as much as $357 including additional shares offered to underwriters. But the significant pop this morning suggests that there is both a lot of demand for the company, and also that it could have potentially captured more capital in its IPO.

(Palo Alto) June 24, 2020 —

Create & Learn …

While the pace of layoffs might be

Degreed lands new ca …

Intellispark, an education

Intellispark Secures …

Career community for …

Fairygodboss, the largest career community

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Fairygodboss, the largest career community for women, has raised $3 million in funding. The funding was led by GSV Acceleration. This financing round closed on April 30 and brings the total capital raised by Fairygodboss to $4 million. “We’re thrilled to have GSV Acceleration as a partner in our mission to improve the workplace for women,” said Georgene Huang, Fairygodboss CEO and Co-founder. Launched in 2015, Fairygodboss has quickly grown during the last three years, helping countless women navigate these tough work issues. “In three years, we’ve grown to reach more than 1 million women a month and have over 60 corporate partners. This funding will enable us to reach even more women and grow our business. We have exciting things in store for 2018 and look forward to having Deborah Quazzo, a well-respected leader in the talent and education industries, join our board,” Georgene Huang told TechStartups.

(Palo Alto) June 24, 2020 —

Create & Learn …

While the pace of layoffs might be

Degreed lands new ca …

Intellispark, an education

Intellispark Secures …

Hustle Secures $30 M …

Hustle, a pioneer of peer-to-peer (P2P)

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Hustle, a pioneer of peer-to-peer (P2P) messaging and the industry's most widely adopted text campaign platform with over 85 million text conversations initiated to date, announced today a $30 million Series B funding round led by Insight Venture Partners with participation from GV and Salesforce Ventures. In conjunction with the financing, Hilary Gosher, Managing Director at Insight Venture Partners, will join the board. This round brings the company's total funding to $42 million. The additional capital will be used to scale sales and engineering, and expand into new vertical markets.

"Hustle's exponential growth is rare, and reflects the company's substantial impact on how customers engage their audiences," said Gosher of Insight. "Hustle has a tremendous opportunity to create jobs and bring value to new vertical markets and new use cases. Insight looks forward to partnering with the Hustle team to drive the company's next stage of growth." Hustle's funding comes on the heels of securing several prominent clients in the business and technology sectors including leading entertainment and ecommerce company, Live Nation. Hustle is already the leading P2P platform for advocacy groups like Sierra Club, and political campaigns including Bernie Sanders, Doug Jones, and over 25 state Democratic parties. The company expects to double in 2018, after triple growth in 2017. "At Hustle, we're using technology to empower humans to be the best relationship workers they can be, instead of automating away their jobs. We're building a platform that empowers organizers, fundraisers, and salespeople to conduct hundreds of real-time personal conversations with their communities, to strengthen relationships through dialogue, and to make big asks when the moment is right," said Roddy Lindsay, co-founder and CEO at Hustle. "We're doubling down on our work in the civic and political sphere, and using it as a springboard to enter new enterprise markets. Relationships win supporters and votes, and relationships also win business." The company has made significant advances to its platform in recent months ramping up its data science and engineering teams. Most recently, Hustle recruited Reddit's former head of data science Joe Gallagher to lead its efforts in better understanding the way text messaging can drive measurable results across different industries. "We're proud to bring Insight and other investors on board who understand that a large part of our success can be attributed to our diverse teams," said Ysiad Ferreiras, Hustle's COO. "We are a company that is 51% women, 48% employees who identify as non-white, and 21% LGBTQ. Hustle has built a product that's empowering organizations and their members to solve real problems in this world -- and our teams' diverse perspectives are solving those problems faster."

(Palo Alto) June 24, 2020 —

Create & Learn …

While the pace of layoffs might be

Degreed lands new ca …

Intellispark, an education

Intellispark Secures …

Degreed gets $42M to …

When an employee is looking to advance in

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When an employee is looking to advance in their career, where they work might have a kind of strict hierarchical path for the role they’re in and what titles come next — but there’s a good chance that employee might want to try something new without leaving their company. Instead of going from just an agent to a manager of agents, or following some existing promotion line, a company that’s large enough probably has plenty of other opportunities within it across many different divisions — each with either a directly-comparable skillset, or one that might need some slight additions. That’s where Degreed, an online service for identifying those skill gaps and how to pick them up, as well as track them, comes. Instead of locking employees into a single trajectory, Degreed hopes to give employers tools to help employees improve their skills even more, and in the end become much more valuable to the employer. Degreed today said it has raised $42 million in a venture financing round co-led by Owl Ventures and Jump Capital, with Founders Circle Capital and existing investors participating. The service launches inside an organization, identifies the content that offers an opportunity to work on skills like project management (often made by the company itself), and then shows employees how to start working on those skills. And those skill gaps between roles might actually be much smaller than those employees think, and it’s just a matter of identifying what they need to work on in order to grow within their company. After that, it identifies the best ways to get those skills, which can come in the form of content or potentially other avenues, and helps employees figure out how far along their progression path they are. “The real challenge is that no matter how big or sophisticated any one content source is, whether it’s higher education and formal training, that’s increasingly a smaller slice of the pie,” Chris McCarthy, who was named CEO of the company today, said. “If you know where to look, you can build any skill. As content proliferates — for enterprises and for individuals — all these platforms are islands of learning. They do a good job of getting through that experience. Nothing prior to that is weaving through those islands of learning.”

(Palo Alto) June 24, 2020 —

Create & Learn …

While the pace of layoffs might be

Degreed lands new ca …

Intellispark, an education

Intellispark Secures …

Utah’s Plurals …

Pluralsight, the Utah-based education

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Pluralsight, the Utah-based education technology company, has revealed its IPO filing. Given the timing of the unveiling, the company is likely targeting a May public debut. Its core business is online software development courses, helping people improve their skills in categories like IT, data and security. Businesses small and large pay Pluralsight to help train their employees. It also has offerings for individual subscribers. In the filing, the company acknowledges that it is a competitive landscape, and names Cornerstone OnDemand, Udacity, Udemy, LinkedIn Learning as others in a comparable market. It also mentions General Assembly, which was recently acquired by Adecco for $413 million. This is the first glimpse we get at Pluralsight’s financials. For 2017, the company brought in $166.8 million in revenue, up from $131.8 million in 2016 and $108.4 million in 2015. Losses are growing, however. This is partly due to a sizeable increase in sales and marketing expenditures. For 2017, the company lost $96.5 million. This is up from losses of $20.6 million in 2016 and $26.4 million in 2015. Pluralsight has been around since 2004. Like many startups outside of the San Francisco Bay Area, the company bootstrapped its business and didn’t raise significant outside funding until 2013. Pluralsight previously raised nearly $200 million in financing. The largest shareholder is Insight Venture Partners, which owned 46.1 percent of the shares prior to the IPO, an unusually high percentage. Co-founder and CEO Aaron Skonnard owned 13.4 percent and investment group ICONIQ owned 8.1 percent. Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan served as lead underwriters. Wilson Sonsini and Goodwin Procter served as counsel. Pluralsight plans to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker “PS.” A provision in the JOBS Act from 2012 helped make it so that companies could file confidentially and then reveal financials and other business information just weeks before making public debuts. This helps companies avoid too much scrutiny in the months leading up to an IPO. There is also a quiet period in this time, meaning that companies are limited in what they can say publicly about their businesses. Like most tech companies, Pluralsight chose to take advantage of this confidential filing provision. But it also announced that it filed, something that companies don’t usually do. Most choose to stay quiet about IPO plans until they make the filings public, unless reporters break the news first. It was no surprise to those who have been following Utah’s tech scene that Pluralsight is planning to list on the stock market this year. The venture-backed “unicorn” has been a late-stage company for several years now, with a reported valuation of $1 billion as of 2014. After a slow first couple of months, there has been a flurry of tech IPO activity in recent weeks. Dropbox, Spotify and Zuora recently debuted. Pivotal, Smartsheet and Carbon Black are amongst the companies expected to list in the coming weeks.

(Palo Alto) June 24, 2020 —

Create & Learn …

While the pace of layoffs might be

Degreed lands new ca …

Intellispark, an education

Intellispark Secures …

Coursera Launches Si …

People need access to high quality learning

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People need access to high quality learning more than ever. Degrees are no exception. That’s why we’re working with our university partners to build a new kind of degree experience. Today, we are excited to announce the development of six new degrees: a Master of Computer Science from Arizona State University, a Global Master of Public Health from Imperial College London, a Master of Computer Science from the University of Illinois, a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of London, a Master of Applied Data Science from the University of Michigan, and a Master of Public Health from the University of Michigan. With the addition of these degrees, Coursera will become a premier destination for world-class degrees with a total of 10 programs offered on our platform. The cost of degrees has skyrocketed at the same time that technology is making postsecondary education more important than ever for career success over a lifetime. We put our heads together with our university partners to figure out a way to deliver degrees more affordably and flexibly with the same quality standards these universities are known for around the world.

(Palo Alto) June 24, 2020 —

Create & Learn …

While the pace of layoffs might be

Degreed lands new ca …

Intellispark, an education

Intellispark Secures …

Former ED Secretary …

Arne Duncan has added another organization to

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Arne Duncan has added another organization to his résumé. The former secretary for the U.S. Department of Education under President Obama recently joined the board of Turnitin, an education technology company that provides services for writing help, literacy skill development and plagiarism checking in K-12 and higher education. Duncan currently serves as a managing partner for Emerson Collective, a philanthropic organization run by Laurene Powell Jobs that focuses on education, immigration reform, the environment and other social justice initiatives. He's also a nonresident senior fellow for the Brookings Institute with a concentration on education policy.

(Palo Alto) June 24, 2020 —

Create & Learn …

While the pace of layoffs might be

Degreed lands new ca …

Intellispark, an education

Intellispark Secures …

Barbie’s latest mo …

The CEO of education tech provider Tynker

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The CEO of education tech provider Tynker tells Moneyish about his partnership with doll owner Mattel and the secret to getting more women in STEM. Barbie no longer needs male technical support. The most iconic of American dolls came under fire in 2014 for a book titled “I Can Be A Computer Engineer” that was mocked as being “almost laughably sexist.” But under new management and in a more woke era, franchise owner Mattel now is working with education tech startup Tynker on a Barbie-themed curriculum to teach kids programming.

(Palo Alto) June 24, 2020 —

Create & Learn …

While the pace of layoffs might be

Degreed lands new ca …

Intellispark, an education

Intellispark Secures …

Turnitin Acquires Pl …

VERICITE, a developer of a plagiarism

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VERICITE, a developer of a plagiarism detection tool used in schools and universities, has been acquired by Turnitin. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed. In a blog post announcing the transaction, Turnitin CEO Chris Caren noted that VeriCite’s leadership and staff will join the Turnitin. Founded in 2014, Vericite claimed as many as 150 institutional customers in K-12 and higher education as of November 2017. In her post announcing the deal, Vericite CEO Valerie Schreiner said that no immediate changes to pricing or service will happen for its customers.

(Palo Alto) June 24, 2020 —

Create & Learn …

While the pace of layoffs might be

Degreed lands new ca …

Intellispark, an education

Intellispark Secures …

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