Space read-alongs aren’t too far away, if you ask us From beaming actors into the class room to plucking things out of space, the second day of Y Combinator’s S21 Demo Day was a fresh snapshot of what nearly 200 startup teams believe is the future of innovation. Yesterday, the TechCrunch team covered the first half…
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Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Last week, Natasha and Alex jumped on Twitter Spaces to discuss the tale of two edtech IPOs: Duolingo, the consumer language learning company, and Powerschool, the enterprise K-12 software platform. It was a rare moment in the sun for the…
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Duolingo landed onto the public markets this week, rallying excitement and attention for the edtech sector and its founder cohort. The language learning business’ stock price soared when it began to trade, even after the unicorn raised its IPO price range, and priced above the raised interval. Duolingo’s IPO proves that public market investors can…
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Many teachers and parents in Indonesia rely on WhatsApp to keep in touch, creating “multiple groups that often become messy and highly ineffective, and result in confusion or lost threads,” says Rizky Aniez, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Gredu. The Jakarta-based startup was created to give everyone involved in the educational process—school administrators,…
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For edtech startups, it’s always been easier to go direct-to-consumer than it is to sell into school districts. The latter has stodgy and strict sales cycles, while the former has a bit more flexibility when it comes to opening up that wallet. The pandemic added validation to this dynamic by supercharging consumer companies like Quizlet and…
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Duolingo, a Pittsburgh-based language learning business last valued at $2.4 billion, has officially filed to go public. The 400-person company, which we explored in great detail in our EC-1, was co-founded by Luis von Ahn, the inventor of CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA, and Severin Hacker. One of the most revealing bits of its story? It’s a…
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Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week, Natasha and Danny, otherwise known as your two new favorite Book influencers (inside joke, you’ll get if you listen to the show), hopped on the mics to take everyone through the news, with Grace and…
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At the heart of Duolingo is its mission: to scale free education and increase income potential through language learning. However, the same mission that has helped it grow to a business valued at $2.4 billion with over 500 million registered learners, has led to tensions that continue to define the business. How do you survive…
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MasterClass, which sells a subscription to celebrity-taught classes, sits on the cusp of entertainment and education. It offers virtual, yet aspirational learning: an online tennis class with Serena Williams, a cooking session with Gordon Ramsay. While there’s the off chance that an instructor might actually talk to you — it has happened before — the…
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A Zoom screenshot with CoLearn’s founding team: Marc Irawan, Abhay Saboo and Sandeep Devaram Indonesian startup CoLearn started as a chain of physical tutoring centers and was in the process of shifting to a hybrid offline-online model when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The team sensed that remote learning would permanently change how students want to…
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