Zoom-based learning company ClassEDU Inc. — led by Blackboard Inc. co-founder Michael Chasen — has raised another $30 million in fresh funding.
The new round comes in part from Menlo Park, California-based education technology investor Owl Ventures, according to a source familiar with the deal. The startup originally raised $16 million, which I detailed in a September article more than a week before the round was announced.
ClassEDU did not return a request for comment at the time of this article. I will update this space when I hear back.
Chasen has been able to gather a group of well-known investors, including Santi Subotovsky, a current Zoom board member from venture firm Emergence Capital, as well as Jim Scheinman and Bill Tai, both early investors in Zoom. ClassEDU is also backed locally by SWaN & Legend Venture Partners and Revolution's Rise of the Rest Seed Fund.
The startup's goal is to craft and roll out a Zoom-based product designed to allow teachers to proctor live tests, have one-on-one conversations, take attendance, hand out assignments and all the other tasks that are taken for granted during in-person learning but are infinitely harder online. It's a topic that has taken on greater weight during a period when millions of students across the country are contending with virtual learning set up in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Chasen said in an interview in September he was focused on selling the product to schools, but added there are also possibilities in the lucrative corporate training market.
Chasen’s other recent executive stints have veered more from his ed-tech roots — his geolocation platform startup, SocialRadar, had raised $12.75 million and made several pivots before it sold for $10 million, according to a source close to the deal at the time. He also held a three-year stint as CEO of Raleigh, North Carolina, drone technology company PrecisionHawk Inc.
But he's most known for Blackboard, which he ultimately helped sell to a private equity firm for $1.64 billion in 2011. He insists that ClassEDU is not competing with Blackboard, which offers both a learning management system and its Collaborate livestreaming product. He said those Blackboard products compete more directly with Zoom, and he expects school districts to still run Google Classroom or Blackboard products for any asynchronous online learning that's not live.
