• Coursmos

  Led · Seed · Feb 2015

  Coursmos began as a mobile app in 2013 and provides bite-sized, user-created micro-courses with personalized learning recommendations based on tracked progression. It has expanded to a web platform and offers a premium tier priced at $8.88 per month for unlimited access. As of last month it had about 520,000 registered users and roughly 4,000 course creators. The company plans to build a corporate version of its platform for employee upskilling and will relaunch its mobile apps. Coursmos identifies its strongest markets as the U.S., Russia, the U.K., India, Brazil and Indonesia and says it will focus expansion on LatAm and Asia. It is an alum of Ukraine-based incubator Happy Farm. Coursmos offers a micro-learning platform that breaks courses into very small, easily digestible video lessons aimed at fitting study into busy users’ lives. Its content is crowd-created and spans categories including business, personal development, technology, design, health & beauty and art, with a current skew toward business topics. Since launching its web platform it reports 1,500 courses composed of 6,631 micro-lessons, 70,000 registered students and roughly 30,000 active users. The company has released iOS and Android apps and a web platform and emphasizes discoverability and short-form engagement to reduce drop-out. Planned product work includes a Netflix-style recommendation system, converting video to searchable text, YouTube integration, an embeddable content widget, in-browser video-editing for instructors, gamification, language localization and app updates. The startup intends to use new funding to expand its team and continue developing these features and scaling its user base. Coursmos is a Russian, mobile-first e-learning startup that delivers minutes-long, bite-sized video lessons aimed at users with limited attention spans. Its courses are crowd-sourced and organized into categories like art, cooking, computer, handicraft, health, and work and business. The app launched on iOS late last month, with an Android app on the way and plans to build a web platform. Features include a 'Your classes' tab for saved courses and a 'mark completed' button on each micro-lesson. To incentivize creators, instructors can charge for courses and Coursmos takes a 9% cut. Content quality is variable today due to the platform relying on user-created courses, and the company cites the challenge of attracting enough creators as a key hurdle. Co-founder Pavel Dmitriev is quoted describing the product as an alternative to long-form MOOCs.

• JETME

  Led · Seed · Sep 2014

  JetMe provides an app-based private jet flight booking service led by CEO Yuriy Romanyukha. The app lets travelers search, view final prices in searches, book, and pay for private jet flights without membership fees. Its mobile technology reduces costs by eliminating the need for facilities, managers, brokerage and handling companies, and non-automated order processing. JetMe also offers options to share the cost of a jet with other passengers, potentially cutting prices by up to 50%. The iOS app is available for private jet bookings between San Francisco and Los Angeles. The company raised $400K in seed funding to add new options and destinations to the service.

No current team members are available.