A Birmingham education technology company has landed six figures in capital, continuing the recent trend of local companies securing seed funding.
Edify Online Corp., which serves as an exchange of independent teaching talents from communities and universities, has obtained a $600,000 bridge round. That follows the company’s strong fundraising effort in 2020 in which it built on a successful period during the pandemic when more clients needed virtual classes and lessons.
The company was founded in 2016 and won $50,000 in the Alabama Launchpad in 2017. Edify CEO Vik Agarwal said the bridge round was raised in less than a month from when he first tested the waters for potential investors.
“What’s really exciting is that a majority of people that invest are actually current employees or (existing) investors in the company, so there were no additional investors in this round outside of that,” Agarwal said. “So (it’s) pretty exciting and shows pretty strong beliefs, pretty strong conditions in the team, and it will put us in a good position.”
He said the bridge round is sufficient to keep the company on track for a while considering the team is still lean and the company has enough cash flow at the moment. But the raise also puts the company in a good position to raise funds in possibly the second or third quarter of this year.
The funds, which were all sourced in Birmingham, will go toward scaling the company over the next six to nine months, mainly focusing on technology, hiring more people, customer acquisition and continuing to build the brand, Agarwal said.
“The last few years for us, being an ed-tech company, we’ve gained a lot of brand recognition in the industry. We’re a platform; we’re a marketplace. We’ve had extreme success on growing our base of highly qualified instructors,” Agarwal said. “The challenge we face is that during peak Covid times, higher education institutions just could not add new vendors and make new expenditures and new relationships, so during that time we stayed extremely lean. We focused on … redesigning our technology and our processes. We were focusing on the team and the customers we haven’t had. And actually, we did a pivot earlier this year that expands the breadth of what we can approach from the customer standpoint.”
In addition to raising money, the company plans to grow its team. It currently has seven employees but is planning to increase its total to 11 this month.
