Online teachers' platform Kiddom raises $6.5m for expansion
Kiddom, a start-up that provides teachers with an online platform for grading, assignment and communication tools, has raised $6.5m in a recent funding round. The round marks the first public fundraising announced by the company, which intends to rival the Google Classroom platform. Funds will be used to develop a full scale operating system for school age students. The firm will also be "building other tools to better help teachers", according to its Chief Academic Officer, Abbas Manjee.
Kiddom’s new platform empowers teachers to have more meaningful interactions and better insights into student performance

AUSTIN, Texas & SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–March 8, 2017–

SXSWedu – Kiddom, the visual collaborative system for K-12 classrooms, announced the launch of a new platform and $6.5 million in total financing led by Khosla Ventures investment partner Keith Rabois, who holds a seat on the board of directors. Since its inception in 2015, the Kiddom platform has experienced rapid, organic growth across hundreds of thousands of classrooms, growing over 30% month-over-month in 2016 and 2017 catalyzed by word-of-mouth teacher referrals. Teacher adoption in hundreds of schools grew rapidly to 95% on average within six months after just a few teachers began to use the product in each school.

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Kiddom’s new centralized platform provides teachers access to a variety of tools required for 21st century teaching and learning. (Graphic: Business Wire)

Kiddom will use the new capital to build additional products and features to accelerate the company’s vision of building an operating system for K-12 education. Kiddom is designed as a collaborative platform to allow teachers and students to work together effortlessly. The platform provides an easy-to-use dashboard for teachers to discover content, assess, and analyze student work; and for students to stay organized, submit work, and get feedback in a timely manner.

Tanya King, a teacher at Beverly Elementary School near Seattle, WA notes, “Kiddom is a real paradigm shift for teachers. We evolved from using an archaic formula to a much more holistic approach that assigns a grade to homework, test performance, and understanding individual student needs and achievements. After training our school staff on using Kiddom, an amazing thing happened; we had more insights about each student and engaged in deep conversations about how we could help each other and our students reach their full potential.”

Kiddom 2.0

Encouraged by viral growth, Kiddom enhanced its platform dramatically by drawing upon field research and feedback from teachers that demonstrated inadequate tools and ineffective processes were hindering the learning process. Kiddom 2.0 ameliorates this by providing educators with a centralized platform to access a variety of dimensions about student performance required for 21st century teaching and learning. More than 50 features were added to the new Kiddom 2.0, highlights include:

Planning : personalized curriculum to meet the changing needs of students

: personalized curriculum to meet the changing needs of students Reports : visualize progress with beautiful analytics that track student performance

: visualize progress with beautiful analytics that track student performance Student Ownership : empower students with the ability to track their own progress

: empower students with the ability to track their own progress Customization : customize content, grading, and analytics specific to unique classroom needs

customize content, grading, and analytics specific to unique classroom needs Collaboration : amplify information sharing amongst teachers, administrators, parents, and the school community at-large

amplify information sharing amongst teachers, administrators, parents, and the school community at-large Beautiful Design: experience a major redesign focused on functionality and usability, designed with educator feedback

The proliferation of Chromebooks, iPads, and BYOD (bring your own device) policies in schools and districts throughout the U.S. has led to rapid growth in the K-12 Educational Software Market. The Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) estimates the current average U.S. spending on software per student ranges from $150-$200, with a total market opportunity of $8.38 billion in the U.S.

Kiddom’s Chief Executive Officer Ahsan Rizvi notes that education software has historically struggled to keep up with the demands of educators, “To date, educators are constrained by archaic processes that are ineffective, spending valuable time on manual tasks and clunky tools. We believe empowering teachers with better tools will serve as the cornerstone of a better educational system. That’s why we are building Kiddom, so teachers can do what they do best: connect, inspire, and help students unlock their full potential.”

Building a community of teachers and seeking their input has led to much of Kiddom’s success. Abbas Manjee, Chief Academic Officer of Kiddom and a former NYC K-12 educator himself, left his high school teaching position to deliver Kiddom’s vision: “As technology gets smarter, the future will not depend on all students learning how to code or take AP calculus. Rather, the future will depend on solving complex problems with empathy and sound decision-making. Technology must ensure educators can teach the whole child.”

Kiddom 2.0 is available for free for teachers and students and available for use on the web at www.kiddom.co and for iOS at the Apple App Store.

ABOUT KIDDOM:

Kiddom is the easiest way to plan, assess, and analyze learning. Headquartered in San Francisco with an office in New York City, Kiddom is a team of passionate educators, designers, and developers building technology to enable all teachers and learners to unlock their full potential. To learn more, visit www.kiddom.co.

ABOUT KHOSLA VENTURES:

Khosla Ventures provides venture assistance and strategic advice to entrepreneurs working on breakthrough technologies. The firm was founded in 2004 by Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. With over four billion dollars under management, the firm focuses on a broad range of areas including consumer, enterprise, education, advertising, financial services, semiconductors, health, big data, agriculture/food, sustainable energy and robotics. Khosla Ventures is headquartered in Menlo Park, Calif.

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Kiddom

Abbas Manjee, 917-426-5686

Chief Academic Officer

press@kiddom.co