Sarah Perez
Edmodo, the collaborative learning network for teachers and students, is announcing today it has closed a $25 million Series C round of funding. The round was led by new investor New Enterprise Associates, Inc. (NEA), and included participation from Edmodo's existing investors Greylock Partners, Benchmark Capital, Union Square Ventures, and Learn Capital. To date, Edmodo has raised $47.5 million.
With the new round, NEA General Partner Tony Florence will be joining the company's board.
TechCrunch recently took a longer look into this company, which allows students and teachers to connect and communicate in a social, but professional, platform. Teachers can use the service to share assignments, class resources, projects, notifications and more, and distribute things like quizzes, or inform students of events. In April, the company announced it had officially crossed 7 million users and was now being used in over 80,000 schools. Today, it's touting having topped 8 million registered users and now reaches 85 of the largest 100 school districts in the U.S. These include Chicago Public Schools, Denver Public Schools, Delaware, Palm Beach, Florida, Clark County, Nevada, and Wake County, North Carolina.
In addition to being used in every U.S. state, the platform is also available elsewhere in the world, with steady growth seen in southeast Asia, Australia and the U.K.
NEA wanted to invest because, as Florence puts it, "Edmodo is far and away the most impressive social learning network in K12 education." Not only was the growth a factor in the firm's decision, but so was its feature set and its API capabilities, he said. The API first became available in March, and allows third-party developers to build apps on top of Edmodo. As TechCrunch's Rip Empson explained in April, this opened up a big opportunity for edtech developers, who traditionally had difficulty when trying to sell products to schools and teachers.
LinkedIn Chairman Reid Hoffman, Partner at Greylock Partners, even went so far as to compare Edmodo's potential to that of Facebook, saying it could become the educational network. "Edmodo has become the hub for sharing best practices and discovering content because teachers want access to each other and to the best learning resources in one place," he said. "We saw a similar thing occur on Facebook for friends and family sharing and on LinkedIn for sharing professional experiences."
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