For Blackboard co-founder Michael Chasen, his new startup, ClassEDU, is personal.
It was a few weeks into the Covid-19 pandemic, and its spread had shut down in-person school, shoving millions of school-age kids into hastily assembled online learning programs. Among them was Chasen’s own three kids, who all attend Montgomery County public schools, and Chasen got to see firsthand how difficult that experience was.
“The discussion that's missing on the national level is the net effect of what is going on right now and how it's going to affect the kids,” Chasen said. "We are hurting a generation of kids with this.”
And it’s not because online learning can’t be successful, Chasen stressed. It's that online learning needs to rapidly evolve to meet the more complex needs for teachers to translate their in-person lessons, and do so seamlessly.
“We have to improve whatever the status quo is now because we are not connecting with students the way they otherwise are learning,” Chasen said. “We need to be focused as a community to ensure we are not leaving these kids behind.”
That was the beginning of his new venture, in which he ultimately raised $16 million in a round first reported by the Washington Business Journal earlier this month. The mission: to build an online learning company on top of the nearly ubiquitous Zoom platform. That product, whose beta version is expected to release in October, is being 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.
As part of his fundraising, Chasen got the backing of big names from Silicon Valley, including Santi Subotovsky, a current Zoom board member from venture firm Emergence Capital, as well as Jim Scheinman of seed firm Maven Partners 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.
It's not unknown territory for Chasen, who helped found Blackboard, a Reston company that's been powering learning management systems for several school systems nationwide, including in Fairfax County, though to mixed success since the pandemic hit. Chasen said his experience at Blackboard has helped him down this path, though he didn't talk very much about that previous venture.
As for ClassEDU, he said the interest level has been enormous, with the company receiving 1,300 inbound leads in just a few hours after its official media debut last week. He said the startup had already been contacted by hundreds of schools and systems. The strength of its offering, he said, is that it builds on top of a tested and familiar Zoom platform, which supplies the online delivery piece — leaving the company and its customers to just focus on the content part.
He compares ClassEDU's setup to an Apple App Store or Salesforce, which have themselves served as platforms for thousands of other apps or technology.
“I have never done a PowerPoint and have people try to buy it for the entire district at the end of the phone call like I have had when showcasing this technology,” Chasen said. “They instantly get it. They instantly know the need. I have not had to explain this to anybody.”
For now, ClassEDU is based in D.C., but has recruited a mix of 50 employees and consultants working remotely around the country, Chasen said. That number could easily double by the end of the year, when the company expects to have more of a public launch, he said. But he envisions this startup, unlike his others, to have more of a virtual than traditional office presence — and to extend past the pandemic. While ClassEDU is focused on selling into the 100,000 schools currently using Zoom, he pointed to other sales possibilities, including the $1 billion market for corporate training.
Chasen’s recent stints have veered from his ed-tech roots — his geolocation platform startup, SocialRadar, had raised $12.75 million and saw 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.
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 live-streaming product. He said those Blackboard products compete more directly with Zoom, and said he expects school districts to still run Google Classroom or Blackboard products for any asynchronous online learning that's not live.
"We want to get this out because we think it's important to make a difference in K12 and higher ed," Chasen said. "We have trained every teacher in the world on how to do online learning. It has sped up the adoption of online learning by five to 10 years."
