Dive Brief:

• LocoMotive Labs, an early learning play-based app maker, announced this week that it had raised $4 million in Series A funding, bringing its total funding to $5.15 million.
• Investors included Softbank Ventures Korea, TAL Education Group, and previous investors K9 Ventures, Kapor Capital, NewSchools Venture Fund, Joe Gleberman, D3Jubilee, and Jerry Colonna.
• The money will be used to expand in both Asia and the United States.

Dive Insight:

The company plans to use its investors for help tapping into the Asian market. TAL Education Group, for example, is one of China's most prominent K-12 tutoring companies. It already has a decent presence in the U.S., with its Todo Math app and teacher dashboard in over 1,000 elementary school classrooms, according to a press release.

The company is particularly interested in spreading math skills to the world's youngest learners, a popular and much-needed goal as job demand in STEM fields is increasingly highlighted.

While LocoMotive Labs is pretty strictly focused on math skills, it joins a number of other STEM-based learning apps like ScratchJR, a free app developed by Tufts University researchers to teach basic coding skills to students as young as five years old.