When it comes to startup tech companies and the K-12 market, it’s not enough to have a great product.
Between unique sales cycles and preoccupied customers – from procurement officers to the teachers themselves – there are a thousand detailed challenges within the bigger mission of mass adoption.
That’s the nut Immersed Games has been trying to crack for years now, in a journey that led the company through the 43North business competition and moving to Buffalo in 2018.
The company has developed a game, Tyto Online, which helps middle-school students learn science and engineering skills.
CEO Lindsey Tropf is confident Tyto works with plenty of anecdotal data from teachers who use it see stronger results in their students. But it was a small change last year that unlocked the kind of fast adoption the team has long been chasing.
“We had a huge spike in teacher sign-ups when Covid hit, but very few of them were getting students into the game,” Tropf said. “When we asked them why, they said, ‘IT doesn’t have time or can’t or won’t install this.”
Supported by a National Science Foundation grant, they made Tyto playable within a browser. No downloads necessary.
“Five times more teachers were getting their students in the game,” Tropf said. “Sometimes we’d see a teacher sign up, and we’d go and check them out and they’d have students in the game already. Since then we’ve seen 30% month-over-month active user growth.”
Immersed Games operates in a building owned by Olmsted Center for Sight, where 12 of its 13 employees are located. The company has closed on about $540,000 of an active seed round and also has received active support from NSF.
Tropf said she is hiring for several roles, from sales to marketing to technology, as she approaches this coming school year with the goal of continued growth.
“Then early next year, we plan to hire additional sales reps and really start scaling and expanding,” Tropf said.
The business, she says, is “starting to flow” just as they’d envisioned all along, with teachers signing up and quickly introducing Tyto to their students. As adoption ramps up, so do feedback and testimonials from customers.
“The browser was that last critical piece for us,” Tropf said. “It’s really exciting after working on this for all these years to see things finally coming into place.”
Immersed Games is the 20th local company to acknowledge growth-oriented financing this year. The others include Jerry ($103 million), Squire ($60 million), Tackle.io ($35 million), Torch Labs ($25 million), Circuit Clinical ($7.5 million), SomaDetect ($6 million), Kickfurther ($5.9 million), HELIXintel ($1.6 million), Joblio ($4 million), Patient Pattern ($1.2 million), Ellicottville Greens ($1 million), Ognomy ($700,000), Braid Babes ($415,000), MemoryFox ($380,000), Zizo Technologies ($200,000), Thimble.io ($125,000), AirExpert ($100,000) and Classavo (undisclosed).
