Top Hat operates an all‑in‑one active learning courseware platform that combines interactive textbooks, lecture slides, quizzes, assignments and a virtual classroom to support in‑person, online, and hybrid teaching. The company also offers Community, a free communication tool integrated with the platform. Top Hat has converted hundreds of textbook titles to interactive digital courseware through recent acquisitions and partnerships with traditional publishers. The company reported 40% revenue growth and serves millions of students at 750 North American colleges and universities, with a team of 400+ employees. With new funding, Top Hat plans to accelerate publisher partnerships and more acquisitions to deliver publisher content directly on its platform and expand its market impact. Top Hat builds a bundled software platform for higher-education instructors, combining in-class quizzing and feedback tools with digital textbooks and course materials. The company has moved beyond its original quiz product to offer a unified set of tools for managing classes and content. Top Hat reports about 2.7 million students enrolled in courses using its tools and counts 750 of the top 1,000 North American colleges and universities as customers. It has exclusive partnerships with textbook publishers Fountainhead Press and Bluedoor Publishing to expand its content offerings. Top Hat plans to use new funding to grow its digital textbook and course-materials efforts. The company is Toronto-based and has raised just under $105 million in total according to Crunchbase. Top Hat provides an interactive, cloud-based teaching platform that lets professors deliver course content, take attendance, and run in-class engagement activities via students' smartphones. The company also offers a marketplace of fully interactive textbooks, test questions, homework and other academic content authored by instructors. Top Hat reports over two million students using its platform and is deployed in more than 750 of the top 1,000 North American schools; it expanded from 90 to more than 200 employees and has offices in Toronto and Denver. The platform includes analytics to help professors understand student comprehension and adapt curricula. Top Hat is focused on accelerating development of new solutions for creating and distributing academic content to provide a viable, more affordable alternative to traditional textbooks. The company targets the roughly $10B US market for post-secondary academic content and teaching tools. Top Hat offers a mobile and web-based classroom response and engagement platform for professors and students. Its products are used by about 300,000 students at more than 400 universities. The company launched in Canada in 2012 and now has offices in San Francisco and Chicago. Top Hat recently updated its apps, releasing a new iPad app for professors and refreshed iOS and Android apps, and plans to bring the professors' app to Android. Financially, the company has raised a total of $20 million to date, including the new Series B. Top Hat plans to use the new funding to build an enterprise product for university administrators featuring sentiment polls and an early warning system to identify students who are slacking off. Top Hat Monocle has built a mobile, cloud-based classroom response solution that allows students to respond on any device, including feature phones. The product gives professors tools to visualize student response data and create quizzes and interactive demos to increase engagement. The company uses a go-to-market model that offers the product free to professors while charging students per semester. Over the past year Top Hat grew headcount from about 20 to 70 employees, including roughly 15 former Groupon employees and two executives. It is live in 285 schools and the COO says it has been generating solid revenue and doesn’t need the money. Top Hat has opened a sales office in Sydney and partnered with Desire2Learn as it pursues integrations, international expansion, and deeper interactive content relationships with publishers and digital media providers.

Total raised

$227M

Funding rounds

7

Latest round

Series E

Latest activity

Feb 2021