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| | 07/31/2012
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| | Scoop
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| | [Actually 7/6/2012]: The May Report: 7/6/2012: I was really not expecting to put out a report today, but then I saw BenchPrep's http://benchprep.com/ CEO Ashish Rangnekar being interviewed on C/NBC about the business and their close on $6MM in Series B funding lead by NEA (a well known player)with participation from Revolution Ventures http://revolution.com/ which invested in one of Groupon's main competitors, LivingSocial (and Zipcar), http://revolution.com/our-companies and as I look at their site, I see some familiar names: "Introducing the Revolution Growth fund... Led by Steve Case, Ted Leonsis and Donn Davis, Revolution Growth invests in high-growth, technology...", but I don't see where they are located; back to Ashish Rangnekar, he talked about their market size and niche (Kaplan is a competitor), plus he did say that the Series B, as he's calling it, was not an easy raise, so now BenchPrep, formerly Watermelon Express, has 17 employees and an outsourced quality assurance team. The company has raised a total of $8.2MM to date, including $2.2MM "in previous financing from Groupon co-founder Erik Lefkofsky's Lightbank www.lightbank.com investment firm." Hey Michael Carney, I believe it's Eric, not Erik. Aside from the congrats to BenchPrep, we should note well where the Series B rounds are coming from. The fact that they are coming from any funding source which does not require the firm to leave town is quite a relief; Ashish did say one thing I didn't quite follow about whether they would prefer that people be looking or not looking for a job; On the jobs front, does anyone know why ADP's estimates are so far off, along with those of our own Diane Swonk (Mesirow) http://www.mesirowfinancial.com/economics/swonk/default.jsp? She and Mark Zandi were predicting 125,000 non-farm jobs and it turned out to be 80,000?
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| | July 6, 2012
The May Report: 7/6/2012: I was really not expecting to put out a report today, but then I saw BenchPrep's http://benchprep.com/ CEO Ashish Rangnekar being interviewed on C/NBC about the business and their close on $6MM in Series B funding lead by NEA (a well known player)with participation from Revolution Ventures http://revolution.com/ which invested in one of Groupon's main competitors, LivingSocial (and Zipcar), http://revolution.com/our-companies and as I look at their site, I see some familiar names: "Introducing the Revolution Growth fund... Led by Steve Case, Ted Leonsis and Donn Davis, Revolution Growth invests in high-growth, technology...", but I don't see where they are located; back to Ashish Rangnekar, he talked about their market size and niche (Kaplan is a competitor), plus he did say that the Series B, as he's calling it, was not an easy raise, so now BenchPrep, formerly Watermelon Express, has 17 employees and an outsourced quality assurance team. The company has raised a total of $8.2MM to date, including $2.2MM "in previous financing from Groupon co-founder Erik Lefkofsky's Lightbank www.lightbank.com investment firm." Hey Michael Carney, I believe it's Eric, not Erik. Aside from the congrats to BenchPrep, we should note well where the Series B rounds are coming from. The fact that they are coming from any funding source which does not require the firm to leave town is quite a relief; Ashish did say one thing I didn't quite follow about whether they would prefer that people be looking or not looking for a job; On the jobs front, does anyone know why ADP's estimates are so far off, along with those of our own Diane Swonk (Mesirow) http://www.mesirowfinancial.com/economics/swonk/default.jsp? She and Mark Zandi were predicting 125,000 non-farm jobs and it turned out to be 80,000?
Editor and publisher: Ron May, ron@themayreport.com, ronaldmay@aol.com,www.themayreport.com, 773-525-3944.
If you missed an article, go here:
www.tmronline.com/A55951/tmrarticles.nsf/vwFullNewsletter
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
The Scoop section:
-- Paul Lee of Lightbank tweets congrats to Anish Ashish Rangnekar
-- Teacher's Pet BenchPrep Raises $6 Million to Grow its Interactive Learning Platform
-- BenchPrep Raises $6 Million Financing Round Led by New Enterprise Associates
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The Scoop section:
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Paul Lee of Lightbank tweets congrats to Anish Ashish Rangnekar
Twitter / iPaulLee: Congrats to @lightbank por
twitter.com/iPaulLee/statuses/220177215059537920
2 days ago - Congrats to @lightbank portfolio company @Benchprep on the $6MM raise! http://pandodaily.com/2012/07/03/tea ... cc: @ashishrangnekar @ ...
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Teacher's Pet BenchPrep Raises $6 Million to Grow its Interactive Learning Platform
http://pandodaily.com/2012/07/03/teachers-pet-benchprep-gets-6-million-to-grow-interactive-learning-platform/
Teacher's Pet BenchPrep Raises $6 Million to Grow its Interactive Learning Platform
by Michael Carney
on July 3, 2012
Interactive learning platform BenchPrep has raised $6 million in Series B financing to disrupt the high school, college, and professional certification self-study markets.
BenchPrep combines traditional ebooks with elements like video lectures, audio lectures, flashcards, question banks, and personalized analytics to create a learning experience entirely distinct from static text-based learning. The company's current 250,000 plus students spend an average of nine hours across 80 sessions per month engaged in its interactive content.
The latest investment round was led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) with participation from Revolution Ventures. Each investor has previous success in the education market and, critical to its founders, buy into the vision of BenchPrep as a consumer-facing brand position to change the way educational content is distributed and consumed.
"Investing in technology to improve education is very important to NEA - and it's a large, $1 trillion plus market," said NEA general partner and new member of BenchPrep's board of directors Peter Barris.
Gone are the days of digging through the dusty back room shelves of a college bookstore looking for a used copy of this year's overpriced course materials. With currently more than 100 courses from 20-plus publishers, BenchPrep is already one of the biggest digital learning platforms around. The company plans to use the financing to expand to over 500 courses by year's end and targets growth to one million students over the next 12 months.
BenchPrep is not a content creator, but rather licenses existing content from industry leading publishers such as McGraw Hill, Princeton Review, and others. The company then creates interactive, personalized courses that are both more comprehensive and more interesting than a traditional textbook.
"Our core competency is our ability to take existing standard content and create an interactive personalized course to be published across multiple devices in less than 24 hours," says its co-founder Ashish Rangnekar. This process is approximately 80 percent automated, with the remaining 20 percent being primarily quality control and final meta-tagging.
Rangnekar says his company doesn't need individual subject matter experts in order to create the world's best content. Instead, they simply work with the best publishers who already employ such experts, piggybacking on their knowledge and leg work.
"Publishers, wary of committing resources to an interactive course development project that requires a specific operating system or device type, are enthusiastically embracing our device-agnostic platform," says co-founder Ujjwal Gupta. BenchPrep's courses are available on the desktop web and through native apps for iOS (iPhone and iPad) and Android.
All BenchPrep content is available through a single interface, making the platform its own digital academy. For example, a high school student can download a single app to access study courses for Calculus, Biology, AP English, and the SATs (each purchased separately). More importantly, it offers a seamless experience across devices, meaning a student can pick up on their tablet where they left off on their desktop, including accessing all notes and previous results. Personalized performance analytics help students evaluate their progress and focus on the areas where they need the most help.
The company's course materials are priced similarly to traditional textbooks, meaning on the order of $50 up to several hundred dollars depending on the subject matter. While two-thirds of its students access their courses on mobile devices, 90 percent of all transactions happen on the Web, says Rangnekar. Although this is supposedly not by design, and courses are available for purchase through all interfaces, the current situation dramatically minimizes the fees paid to platform providers such as Apple.
BenchPrep's current goal is not to replace textbooks but instead to first disrupt the self-study market of tutors and study aids. This market is where students have the most autonomy in their buying decisions rather with than school mandated textbooks. As the company grows, it hopes to offer multiple choices in each subject category. To facilitate this, BenchPrep plans to roll out an Amazon-like rating and review mechanism over the next next [that's a typo folks] 4-6 weeks.
For publishers, BenchPrep is a "direct to consumer distribution channel" that requires no marketing spend on their part. One key question in the company's model is how long will these publishers be willing to license their content to a company that increasingly seems like a competitor. Rangnekar answered this, saying:
"We have no intention of getting into the content creation business. We are a distribution platform and we actually help publishers maintain pricing from physical textbook to digital course material. Whereas with traditional ebooks the price point is almost always lower, one of our courses doesn't look like a book, feel like a book, talk like a book, allowing us to separate its value from that of a book. If a company makes X margin selling their physical textbook through Amazon, we agree to deliver that same exact margin via BenchPrep. More importantly, the student gets a far richer more interactive experience and sees greater value in our courses, something they're gladly willing to pay for."
Chicago-based BenchPrep currently has 17 full time employees and an outsourced quality assurance team. The company has raised a total of $8.2 million to date, including $2.2 million in previous financing from Groupon co-founder Erik Lefkofsky's Lightbank investment firm.
There are other competitors in the space including existing test prep giants such as Kaplan. Also, other startups are tackling the market such as BarMax which is famous for offering one of the most expensive iPad apps of all time. Its $1,000 LSAT prep-course was a relative steal compared to the $4,500 classroom course offered by the likes of Kaplan, but now seems exorbitant in comparison to BenchPrep's analogous $300 course. Rangnekar compares these previous offerings to monopolies and is hell bent on introducing additional competition and consumer choice to the marketplace.
"At the end of the day, we are trying to solve the problems of the student," says Rangnekar. "This philosophy hasn't been implemented for the longest time. Most of the current market consists of institutional products whose customer is the University not the student. We are keeping students as the centerpiece of everything."
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BenchPrep
Exam Prep Platform: iTunes of exam prep.
Game Mechanics · Chicago
BenchPrep is a learning platform that helps students study for any exam on any device (computers (web), iPhone, iPad, and Android). BenchPrep courses are interactive, adaptive & social.... read more
Ujjwal Gupta
Founder
Ashish Rangnekar
Founder
Paul Lee
Investor
Michael Carney
Michael Carney has spent his career exploring the world of early stage technology as an investor and entrepreneur and has participated in building companies in multiple countries within North and South America and Asia. Ultimately, he is an enthusiast of all things shiny and electronic and is inspired by those who build businesses and regularly tackle difficult problems. You can follow Michael on Twitter @mcarney.
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BenchPrep Raises $6 Million Financing Round Led by New Enterprise Associates
http://revolution.com/benchprep-raises-6-million-financing-round-led-new-enterprise-associates
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Home » BenchPrep Raises $6 Million Financing Round Led by New Enterprise Associates
BenchPrep Raises $6 Million Financing Round Led by New Enterprise Associates
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Company to Develop More Interactive, Personalized Courses for Web, Tablet and Mobile
CHICAGO, Jul 03, 2012 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- BenchPrep, the world's only interactive marketplace and learning platform that works across desktop, iPhone, iPad and Android devices, today announced that the company closed a successful $6 million venture capital round led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) with participation from Revolution Ventures.
Since the launch last year of its learning platform, BenchPrep has experienced rapid growth, working with top education publishers to create interactive, personalized courses for high school and college coursework, professional certifications, academic test preparations and more. In 2010, BenchPrep had raised a round of funding from Lightbank, a Chicago based venture capital fund started by Eric Lefkosky and Brad Keywell, both of whom would continue to serve as board of directors. The company will use the fresh infusion of capital to develop additional courses and expand its user base.
"Our goal is to become the platform students use to study for any subject from any publisher on any device," said BenchPrep co-founder Ashish Rangnekar. "We're focused on creating interactive courses and already have one of the largest libraries. We go beyond creating videos and eBooks -- we take content from books, study guides, video lectures, question banks and flashcards and combine them to create truly interactive and personalized courses."
The marketplace response to BenchPrep's vision has been impressive, accounting for the investor excitement that met the recent funding round. The platform was launched in July 2011 with two publishers and five courses. The course library grew to 100 within just 10 months, and the company expects to offer 500 courses by the end of the year. BenchPrep's unique approach completely disrupts the current industry-pricing model by delivering the value of a comprehensive course for a price point comparable to that of a book.
"The BenchPrep scalable course creation technology can take any standard digital book and build an interactive, personalized, cross-platform course in a single day," said BenchPrep co-founder Ujjwal Gupta. "And publishers, wary of committing resources to an interactive course development project that requires a specific operating system or device type, are enthusiastically embracing our device-agnostic platform."
Since the company began with two publishers a year ago, its publishing partner roster has grown to more than 20, including top publishers such as McGraw Hill, Princeton Review, Wiley, Cengage Learning, O'Reilly, Sourcebooks and many more. BenchPrep delivers unique value to publishers by providing a new direct-to-consumer distribution channel.
"Investing in technology to improve education is very important to NEA -- and it's a large, $1 trillion plus market," said Peter Barris, general partner, NEA, who joins the BenchPrep board of directors. "The BenchPrep team is tackling one of education's most fragmented segments -- exam preparation -- and unlocking huge potential by turning static print content into interactive content accessible across multiple platforms and devices. We are especially impressed by the significant traction the team is seeing on both sides -- the acceleration among publishers adopting the platform, and the students signing up at a rapid rate and spending more and more time online with the coursework."
BenchPrep's powerful platform is convenient to use because it aggregates all courses on a single platform. For example, a high school student can study for subjects like Calculus or Biology, any AP exam, and important college admissions exams like SAT all from the same interface. It is personalized with robust analytics across publishers, study subjects and devices, and it delivers an adaptive learning experience with a single user interface for all functions. These features make BenchPrep highly popular with a growing student user base.
BenchPrep is currently used by more than 250,000 students, two-thirds of whom access their courses on mobile devices. BenchPrep's analytics help students focus on the areas where they need the most help, and its sync function allows students to pick up where they left off in their studies no matter which device they're using. Students average 78 BenchPrep sessions per month, typically spending an average of nine hours a month engaged in interactive learning.
With an incredible array of tools to promote lifelong learning and an industry-disrupting pricing and learning delivery strategy, BenchPrep is poised to continue its strong growth trajectory. Find out more about BenchPrep at www.benchprep.com .
About BenchPrep
BenchPrep is a marketplace and learning platform for interactive courses for high school, college, professional certifications and more. The company partners with best-in-class publishers, including McGraw Hill, Cengage Learning, and Princeton Review to create courses from flat educational content. BenchPrep is the world's learning platform where students can study and sync their learning performance in sync across the web, mobile and tablet devices. The company was voted "most innovative and best-in-class test prep and assessment platform" at the 2010 Education Innovation Summit and won the 2010 New Venture Challenge competition at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. BenchPrep has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, TechCrunch, Publishers Weekly and Fast Company as a leading education innovator.
About NEA
NEA is a leading venture capital firm focused on helping entrepreneurs build transformational businesses across multiple stages, sectors and geographies. With about $11 billion in committed capital, the firm invests in information technology, healthcare and energy technology companies at all stages in a company's lifecycle, from seed stage through IPO. NEA's long track record of successful investing includes more than 170 portfolio company IPOs and more than 290 acquisitions. For additional information, visit www.nea.com .
About Revolution Ventures
Revolution Ventures invests in start-ups and early-stage companies founded and led by passionate entrepreneurs. Revolution Ventures is focused on investing in technology-enabled businesses that empower consumers and disrupt existing, multi-billion dollar industries and has invested in more than a dozen companies since being founded in 2005 by Steve Case (co-founder of AOL) and Tige Savage, who serves as President. Revolution Ventures is headquartered in Washington D.C. For more information, visit www.revolution.com/ventures .
http://revolution.com/benchprep-raises-6-million-financing-round-led-new-enterprise-associates
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