London-based Quipper has closed a $5.8 million Series A2 funding round, TechCrunch reported.
The round for the e-learning platform was participated in by existing investors Atomico, a London-based venture capital firm led by Skype Co-Founder Niklas Zennström and Japan-based education publisher Benesse. There were also other unnamed investors who provided support for Quipper's latest tranche of funding which has now reached 10 million, the report said.
Founded in December 2010, Quipper's primary product is Quipper School. It allows teachers and educators to give and monitor assignments, provide answers to questions through IM, give feedback and scores and track the learning progress of each student. Quipper was established by Masayuki Watanabe who also co-founded DeNA, a social gaming firm. Its last fundraising round was in 2012 when it gathered $3.6 million for its Series A round, the report said.
Quipper intends to deploy the new funding to help its expansion plans to new markets in Asia and Latin America. So far, the platform is available is Asian countries like the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand. It also sees a possible market for its e-learning approach in the UK where it would rival other mobile education platforms like Gojimo, the report said.
Students are able to use the free cloud software from any device, whether from a smartphone, tablet or through a PC with its lectures and quizzes on Quipper catered to the regional curricula. So far, there are over 7,000 educational courses on Quipper, with over 8.5 million learners using the cross-platform and cross-device software, the report said.
The partnership with Benesse also allowed Quipper to get large amounts of learning data. It has used these to enhance the retention and improve the attainment level of learners in its platform by utilizing it to provide social, gamified or adaptive learning, the report said.
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