Think of how much has changed over the last handful of years in the K-12 education space.
It's been a lot not only for students and their parents, but also for businesses like Buffalo-based Immersed Games, which creates educational games for middle and high schoolers to develop STEM skills.
“We certainly have never been able to rest on our first customer discovery,” said founder and CEO Lindsey Tropf. “Things can change pretty fast, and we need to have open ears all the time.”
Customer discovery journeys have been important to Immersed Games since Tropf made the company her full-time focus in 2015. More recently, that strategy has led Immersed Games to pivot its business model, with the help of UB Cultivator, a startup program at the University at Buffalo that has invested $100,000 in Immersed Games.
Previously, the Buffalo-based startup focused on selling directly to schools and school districts, but that meant having a large in-house sales team, which requires raising a lot of funding, a tough task in the current economy. The business has raised a total of about $2 million in venture capital funding and $2 million in grant funding.
Plus, with funding decreasing for districts since the pandemic, many are pulling back on purchases.
Schools still wanted to use the startup’s games, but they suggested Tropf see if she could embed them directly into the curricula that the districts are buying.
“(The publishers) were really interested,” she said. “That’s why we went back to Cultivator. We needed to start doing fresh customer discovery.”
Through that process, Immersed Games, a 2018 43North contest winner, validated the business model pivot and started focusing on the curricula partnerships.
Tropf is working toward closing partnership deals with a top 10 curriculum provider in the U.S., which would embed the game experience into each chapter of some of its math curricula, and one of the largest U.S. online schools, which would license existing Immersed Games science content. She said she couldn’t name specific companies yet because the deals aren’t finalized.
Those partnership conversations also led Immersed Games, headquartered at 1160 Main St., Buffalo, to apply for grants to meet the needs of the curricula business model.
The company, which employs 13, recently got a $250,000 Strategic Partnership for Industrial Resurgence grant from the U.S. Department of Education to work on probability and statistics skills for middle schoolers in its games.
The funding backs a prototype and pilot, with the option to apply for the second phase of the grant, which could mean an additional around $1 million.
Immersed Games also recently got a $100,000 grant from the Administration for Community Living out of the Department of Health and Human Services. The funding will go towards the startup working towards its game being fully accessible based on accessibility guidelines – something basically no game has fully met yet, according to Tropf.
The business is working with the Visually Impaired Advancement and blind or visually impaired students for prototyping.
Her company could apply for phase two of that grant as well, which could mean an additional about $575,000.
Meanwhile, Immersed Games continues to organically add and renew users. The company has grown its active users 84% over the last 12 months compared to the prior 12 months.
Tropf declined to disclose revenue estimates.
Immersed Games is the ninth local company to acknowledge a private, growth-oriented round of funding this year. The list includes Strideful ($100,000), Circular.eco ($100,000), Immersed Games ($100,000), Edenesque ($175,000), TeleSafety ($230,000), SelectFI ($750,000), Top Seedz ($750,000), MimiVax ($5.8 million) and CleanFiber ($28 million).
