Dunce Deals #2 - Tope, Athena, and Kritic
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).
I hope you had an awesome week! For those of us in the US, we continue to wonder how technology cannot make voting faster and more secure, as we continue to literally hand count paper ballots sent by postal mail (is that still around ?!?). I’m sure we will get every single vote from Nevada counted within a month. Looking forward to their next lively update.
Apparently google has just created this static image for the answer to “elections 2020” since it hasn’t changed in days.
Thoughts
This week I detail the second set of main trends in edtech and future of work that I have seen in my own portfolio and from the fifty or so pitches I get a month. Enjoy!
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.
sMy top three deals this week don’t follow any one theme. Instead, they each hit on a specific area. Tope is going after LatAm SMB’s with an MBA program. Athena is in the business of giving people the motivation to read non-fiction books through audio reading lists. And Kritik (a Dunce Deal) is founded by Mohsen Shahini, one of the co-founders of TopHat, one of the very successful college tools, adopted by professors and paid by students. This time he’s going after a peer-grading system for profs.
Tope
Description: unaccredited Netflix-style MBA in LatAm
Website: topeuniversity.com
Founder: rori alvarez cadavieco
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roberto-alvarez-cadavieco-rori/
Email: rori@topeuniversity.com
Stage: Pre-seed
Raising: Yes
Dunce Deal: No
Notes: See this week’s post on the theme of MBA’s for SMBs. While I’m not convinced a pure streaming approach will work, it does allow them to hit a very affordable price.
Athena
Athena: Courses organized around reading lists of audio books.
Website: readathena.com
Founder: ted gay
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tedgay
Email: ted@readathena.com
Stage: Pre-Seed
Raising: Yes
Dunce Deal: No
Notes: There are many companies trying to figure out how to turn audio into a teaching tool - Alpe and Dorm being two recent ones. To date, interactivity has not been a core feature for any of them. Athena is trying to push farther into interactive.
Kritik
Description: Kritik provides peer-grading solutions to college professors.
Website: kritik.io
Founder: Mohsen Shahini
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mohsen-shahini-34126713/
Email: mohsen@kritik.io
Stage: Seed
Raising: Yes
Dunce Deal: Yes
Notes: This is a space that generally scares me, because it feels too much like school sales, which I avoid. But colleges are interesting in that professors have a lot of control over their course materials list, so things that professors like can get on that list and students pay for them. Apps like TopHat which Mohsen co-founded, really figured that model out. He’s using the same business model to tackle peer grading with Kritik.