Blackbird Ventures has led a $40 million Series B capital raising round for education resources company Edrolo, with four superannuation funds supporting the round.
The super funds were Aware Super, HESTA, NGS Super and Telstra Super. AirTree Ventures, which led Edrolo’s $2.6 million Series A round in 2015, and SecondQuarter Ventures also supported the round.
Melbourne-based Edrolo was founded by Ben Sze, Duncan Anderson and Jeremy Cox.
Sze said: “It’s hard to believe Edrolo has been creating and publishing curriculum resources for nearly ten years now. We’ve partnered with thousands of schools across Australia, helping teachers educate the next generation. Last year we reached a massive 71 million online video plays and 106 million pieces of content viewed by teachers and students through Edrolo.”
He said the company, which now employs almost 200 people, had, to date, reinvested 100% of its revenue back into the business along with investment funding.
The new funding round will finance an ambitious resource rebuild which will create a complete catalogue of core curriculum-aligned resources for science, maths, humanities and more for secondary school students Australia-wide, allowing for curricula differences from state-to-state, from Year 7 to Year 12. Year 7 content including videos, textbooks and online content has already been created.
Edrolo initially sought individual sales from parents for but after receiving favourable feedback from teachers changed its marketing within a few years to offering packages to schools. Teachers in schools that use the packages say they save them time in preparing presentations and marking and this time can be used to provide individual assistance.
Aware Super private equity senior portfolio manager Jenny Newmarch said the fund had decided to make a direct investment in Edrolo as it anticipated that, in addition to generating financial returns, development of the company would have a positive effect for its members. As the fund for state government employees in NSW, Victoria and Western Australia, Aware Super has thousands of teacher members.
Edrolo was initially set up to produce curriculum-specific tutorial videos for Year 12 high school students in Victoria and NSW. The company joined the Startmate Accelerator in 2013 and Startmate became its first investor. Blackbird then led the company’s seed round the same year.
According to Blackbird, the inflexion-point in Edrolo’s development came when it took on the challenge of moving from producing add-on coaching products to developing core curriculum material.
Image: Edrolo founders Jeremy Cox, Ben Sze and Duncan Anderson, with a selection of the company’s text books.