As learners increasingly flock to its online tutoring platform amid Covid, Wyzant is being bought by online education company IXL Learning.
San Francisco-based IXL announced it has agreed to acquire Wyzant, a Chicago company that offers a network of more than 65,000 online tutors.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Founded in 2005, Wyzant has built an online tutoring marketplace for anyone from kindergarteners to adult learners to connect with one-on-one mentors.
Buoyed by increased demand during the pandemic as parents and students look for additional educational support, Wyzant said it reported record-breaking company growth in 2020.
"We saw a big uptick, particularly in the K-8 space," Wyzant President and COO Elaine Richards said in an interview, adding that the company's online lessons doubled year-over-year in 2020.
Tutors on Wyzant also benefited from the increased demand, with the company seeing its first tutor reach $1 million earned on the platform.
"We have some tutors who do really well and have built very nice small businesses with Wyzant," Richards said.
Wyzant raised its only round of VC funding in 2013 when it landed $21.5 million from Accel. Prior to that, the startup had been bootstrapped by co-founders Andrew Geant and Mike Weishuhn.
Richards said Wyzant will remain a standalone brand and continue to be based in Chicago. The company, which has around 70 employees, won't see any layoffs as a result of the acquisition, Richards said.
Founded in 1998, IXL's learning platform is used by more than 11 million students in 95 of the top 100 school districts, the company says. The company has been on an acquisition spree in recent years, acquiring Vocabulary.com last year, Education.com in 2019 and ABCya in 2018.
The Wyzant deal is expected to close in the first quarter of this year.
