Nearpod makes software and content that lets teachers create and distribute interactive lessons, virtual field trips and quizzes to students' mobile devices. The platform is free for teachers, with schools or districts paying for premium lessons and features. Nearpod offers about 3,500 ready-to-teach lessons and claims to reach one in ten K–12 schools in the U.S. Cofounded in 2012 by Guido Kovalskys, Felipe Sommer and Emiliano Abramzon, the company produces some lessons in-house and works with publishing partners such as Common Sense Education and LearnZillion. Nearpod says it will use Series B proceeds to hire and develop more proprietary digital content for its library. The company competes with other classroom mobile tools including ClassDojo and Socrative. Nearpod provides teachers with a platform to deliver interactive lessons and real-time assessments to students on browsers, smartphones and tablets during class. Teachers select or create digital lessons from a content marketplace and assign them to student accounts, enabling in-class engagement that resembles interactive stories, projects or mobile games. The product gives teachers visibility into student mastery and struggles to inform instructional decisions, while Nearpod says it does not store student data for long-term analysis due to privacy concerns. The company reports 1.6 million accounts (mostly student accounts), at least 100,000 teachers across 10,000 schools used the platform in 2016, and about 2,000 schools have converted to the paid premium version. Nearpod has been revenue-generating since 2013 and offers a freemium model plus a premium tier with expanded content and creation/storage capabilities. The company is exploring 3D images and virtual reality content to expand immersive instructional experiences. Nearpod offers a cross-platform app that lets teachers create multimedia-rich lessons and synchronized presentations accessible on iOS, Android, Windows 8 and modern web browsers. Each Nearpod slide can include quizzes, polls and assignments that teachers can track, and students can draw, record or create multimedia responses. Many content-creation tools are available for free under a freemium model; additional features, reports and support start at $10 per user per month, with school and district pricing negotiable. Nearpod operates a content store with free and paid materials from partners including CK-12, LearnZillion and TIME for Kids. The company says more than 1.8 million students use the tool every month and it has paid contracts in over 1,000 schools. Launched in 2012 with offices in Menlo Park, CA and Hallandale Beach, FL, Nearpod plans to use its recent funding to grow its sales and marketing staff. Nearpod provides a synchronized web and mobile platform that lets teachers create and share interactive presentations, web pages, videos, quizzes and lessons to students' devices in real time. The product combines presentation creation, mobile distribution and classroom response features, enabling Q&As, polls, drawings, essays and realtime student responses with teacher control. It includes analytics and a dashboard view so teachers can see individual and class-level answers and engagement data. The platform runs on iOS, Android and most web-enabled devices and is built to create a secure sharing environment for instructors. Since launching in summer 2012, Nearpod has registered 95K teachers and seen over 500K student app downloads across 100 countries. The company targets K-12 and the BYOD movement and positions itself against players like Top Hat, Amplify and LMS providers by focusing on easy-to-use presentation tools. Nearpod offers a freemium monetization strategy (Silver free tier, Gold $10/month, and a School Edition at $10/month/teacher), has converted 300 schools to paying customers, is on track for a $2M revenue run-rate, and aims to be profitable by year-end; it has raised a total of $1.5M to date.

Total raised

$36M

Funding rounds

4

Latest round

Series B

Latest activity

Mar 2017