Online tutoring platform Trilogy Mentors has used the pandemic to its advantage, closing on a $1.1 million raise and expanding platform use tenfold since the start of the year.
The $1.1 million debt round closed on June 30 and was led by several publicly traded education companies and Baltimore-based angel investors, Trilogy Mentors founder and Chief Executive Officer John Failla said.
"Once March 15 hit, the world pretty much shut down, but we got laser focused on supporting our partners because we knew when investors got back to the table, we’d have the best story to tell," he said. "Everyone involved is investing because they believe in the company."
Failla said the startup plans to use the funds to expand product and platform development.
"We want to create the best all-in-one platform in the business," he said. "A lot of the funds will be used to build out our business management tools, further develop our virtual classrooms and create a one-to-many classroom experience, leveraging the data analytics our platform is collecting to drive tutoring."
In Sept. 2019, the company closed a pre-seed funding round of $835,000, led by Rosetta Stone.
Trilogy originally launched as an in-person tutoring program and went through the Lighthouse Labs accelerator in 2016 before transitioning to a technology company. The SaaS startup now provides a cloud-based service allowing educators to launch and scale a branded, relationship-based online learning platform.
Failla said he initially decided to move to an online platform to serve a larger number of students.
"As a business, our goal was to create relationships. The number one reason people weren't using tutoring services was logistics," he said. "By going online, we could better engage our user base and scale more effectively."
Failla said last March he was approached by two tutoring companies looking to move their services online but not knowing where to start. He realized Trilogy Mentors had an opportunity to create a robust network by on-boarding new tutoring partners.
When Trilogy Mentors released its licensing product in Aug. 2019 they had seven partners and several thousand minutes per month of online instruction under their belts. By January, that number had climbed to 15,000 minutes of instruction per month, and by May, about a month after Covid forced schools to operate exclusively online, the startup had eclipsed 150,000 instruction minutes per month.
"None of [our partners] had the experience of transitioning instruction to a virtual environment," he said. "We don’t just have a unique platform; we also have the experience in the sense that we went from in person to online. We've been able to solve a very unmet need in the market."
