Built In Chicago and Marengo Hampshire Partners would like to congratulate October's Startup of the Month: eSpark Learning! This company harnesses the power of technology to help elementary school students succeed through fun and educational games.
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Former management consultant and teacher David Vinca founded eSpark with a focus on technology because, as he says, “It’s the best way to personalize learning and increase student engagement.” Last month, eSpark raised $5.7 million in Series A, bringing total funding to to nearly $7 million. Chicago-based MK Capital led the round and also serves on the Board of Directors. The 500 Startups alum also hired Luke Shepard (formerly a team member at Facebook) as CTO at that time.
eSpark’s motto is “Where learning meets fun,” a belief embodied in their use of iPad apps to help students learn. While educational iPad apps exist in spades, eSpark assesses student needs to create personalized curricula, which not only helps kids but saves teachers time, too. Their system of goal-based learning through a fun medium promises to be attractive to students and teachers, who are more and more likely to employ iPads in their teaching. Karen Buckner from MK Capital says eSpark measures its success by “its ability to deliver quantifiable achievement results along with its ease of use for both the teachers and students [to provide] real value to schools.”
We caught up with Vinca, who told us more about his company and plans for the future.
What does eSpark do?
Vinca: eSpark is "Pandora for Education Apps." Innovative schools are buying iPads for learning. Teachers struggle sorting through the 103,000 educational apps to find the right apps for their students. eSpark develops personalized learning plans for students through the best third party educational apps. Students log in to the eSpark iPad app and dive into the best educational games, instructional videos, and audiobooks that have been selected just for them based on their individual learning needs. Eleven studies of effectiveness have been conducted and all prove eSpark accelerates student achievement at 2-5x the typical learning pace.
How did the idea for eSpark come about?
Vinca: I read the book Work Hard, Be Nice [by Jay Mathews] about the dramatic impact the KIPP network of charter schools has had in helping disadvantaged students get to and through college. We set out to find out how we could make KIPP's amazing teachers even more effective. When we interviewed their high performing teachers, we discovered almost all of them cited their #1 challenge was differentiating instruction, or meeting the needs of each individual student. We saw technology as our way to differentiate for each student and enable learning to be more fun for students.
What is your company's biggest strength?
Our early customers and our team. It's been incredible to work with some of the most innovative school and district leaders who are partnering with us to help raise student achievement. Our initial customers are ambassadors for us and spreading the word organically to other schools. And we are getting better as we work with the best. The other main strength is our extremely passionate, hard-working team of educators, software engineers, and salespeople who power eSpark.
What are your goals for 2012?
To grow our impact on student achievement so students have more success in school and in life. To do that, we are looking to hire and grow our team in Chicago. We just hired a new CTO from the Facebook Platform Team (Luke Shepard), who is recruiting great designers and engineers to help us grow our impact.
Visit eSpark Learning’s website, check out their BIC profile and follow them on Twitter at @esparklearning.
