Dunce Deals #1 - Giant Room, FourthBrain, and Handsome

Hi, I'm John Danner, Managing Director of Dunce Capital.  Dunce Deals is my look at the most interesting deals and news from edtech and the future of work.  In the last four years, I have made over two dozen pre-seed investments in the space including Lambda School, where I am on the board, Outschool, Prenda, and Contra.  Before Dunce, I founded three companies, NetGravity (IPO), Rocketship Public Schools (12k students) and Zeal (sold 2018).

After a few months of hand publishing Dunce Deals, this is the first week on substack, so I’m numbering it #1. We can call the previous editions “vintage”, which greatly increases their value. Hopefully substack will make it easier for everyone to unsubscribe, share with friends, and generally treat Dunce Deals like the football it was meant to be.

News

Halloween is my favorite holiday… by far. Here is a picture of me with one of my scary ghouls a couple of years ago. I am sadly going to opt out of Halloween this year, because covid makes it feel like a bad idea. But I will be back in force next year.

I’m pretty excited to announce a new deal, Prendea, which I think of as Twitch for K12. They are based in LatAm and doing some amazing things with live streamed learning.

Thoughts

Continuing in the vein of full transparency, this week begins a four part series detailing some of the trends in education and future of work that I think are fundamental to making and evaluating new startups in the space.

Deals

Please feel free to reach out directly to the founders or I am happy to connect you.  I would love it if you would send me deals you think I missed.  I invest in edtech and future of work, ideally idea and pre-seed, but seed and Series A are awesome too. One great thing this week is that these startups are all run by awesome female founders. I’m looking forward to the day when that is not worth noting.

Giant Room

Description: live online and in person STEAM (STEM + Arts) workshops

Website: thegiantroom.com

Founder: Azi Jamalian

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/azadeh-jamalian/

Email: azi@thegiantroom.com

Stage: Pre-Seed

Raising: Yes

Dunce Deal: No

Notes: This week’s live k12 company :) Giant Room is doing both live online and in person workshops.

FourthBrain

Description: from Andrew Ng's AI Fund, Lambda for Machine Learning engineers

Website: fourthbrain.ai

Founder: Salwa Muhammad

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/salwanur

Email: salwa@fourthbrain.ai

Stage: Pre-Seed

Raising: Yes

Dunce Deal: No

Notes: Salwa is a great female founder, previously a VP at Trilogy, one of my favorite companies. Machine Learning is clearly a huge upskilling need.

Handsome

Description: Upskilling for the beauty industry.

Website: handsomeapp.com

Founder: April Dominguez

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aprildominguez

Email: april.dominguez@handsomeapp.com

Stage: Pre-seed

Raising: Yes

Dunce Deal: No

Notes: Very early, but going after the 2m professionals in the beauty industry, an industry where despite relatively low salaries, there is a significant amount of private pay upskilling to keep up with trends and techniques.