Dive Brief:
- Chicago-based startup Classkick announced a $1.7 million seed funding round for its app aimed at closing the student achievement gap.
- The investment round was led by Kapor Capital, which has invested in several other solutions aimed at improving outcomes for kids from low-income families, and also included Lightbank, Adam Pisoni, and Great Oaks Venture Capital.
- Classkick provides teachers with a dashboard to monitor a student's progress on work being completed on iPads so they can see who is struggling in real-time without relying on a student to take the initiative and ask for help.
Dive Insight:
While tech is a pre-requisite for the app, TechCrunch points out that this may not be such a big issue: A survey by Project Tomorrow found that a third of the nation's students use school issued-mobile devices. Take into consideration President Obama's ConnectEd initiative and the question over lack of tech could be a non-issue one day.
According to Classkick co-founder Andrew Rowland, a Teach for America alum who went back to school to study computer science, the end goal of the company is to connect a student's work with his or her parents, teachers,and administrators. The new funds will be used to bring on more engineers and better the app's user experience.
