Cambridge ed-tech startup Socrative raised $750,000 in seed funding from True Ventures, NewSchools Ventures, and a handful of angel investors, including LearnLaunchX co-founders Jean Hammon and Eileen Rudden, according to TechCrunch.
According to TechCrunch source, Socrative closed the majority of the round back in April, but has received even more since then and remained quiet about its financing and investors.
"We've expanded our team from two to four FTE and have formed Fall Partnerships with many Massachusetts and national districts. It's an exciting time of functionality and design growth for us," Socrative CEO and co-founder Benjamen Berte told Boston Business Journal.
Socrative is a cloud-based intelligent response system, designed to engage K-12 students in the classroom. Teachers can create and distribute quizzes, pose conversation-sparking questions and conduct class polls via the Web and Socrative's mobile apps for iOS and Android. Students can then respond through their laptops, smartphones or tablets, allowing teachers to better understand and track student comprehension in "realtime."
Though the initial prototype was designed by Amit Maimon out of MIT, Maimon brought on Benjamin Berte and Michael West after graduation in 2010. Berte and West then co-founded the company and bootstrapped from family and friends before joining the Palo Alto incubator Imagine K-12 and scoring a small amount of seed funding. After finishing up in California, the duo headed home to Boston. Socrative has been working out of the Cambridge Innovation Center ever since.
Given its relatively small amount of financing, the company has seen great success and growth. In the 2012-2013 school year, Socrative saw 113 million questions answered and 278,000 quizzes created and disseminated across 3.2 million teacher and student users. Towards the end of the year, teachers were joining at a rate of 1,000 per day, Berte told TechCrunch.
With new funding and a bright future ahead, Socrative is planning to conduct a design overhaul in early August, including but not limited to multi-selection multiple choice questions, Common Core assessment tagging, back channel-style discussions and student quiz navigation. Berte also said that Socrative hopes to integrate the process with Google Apps for Education, which would allow users to access Socrative simply by signing into Google, as well as export assessment reports from Google Drive.
