Dunce Deals #26 - Hallo, Lancify, and Ello
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 three dozen pre-seed investments in the space including Lambda School, where I am on the board, Outschool, GetSetup, and Maven. Before Dunce, I founded three companies, NetGravity (IPO), Rocketship Public Schools (12k students) and Zeal (sold 2018).
Thoughts
This week I had my college daughter and two of her friends over. It was mind blowing to see how well they had adapted to weird covid changes until I realized that they didn’t adapt at all, the world adapted to them. Here’s the piece I wrote about it.
News
We are doing an inside round at GetSetup and Neil has been nice enough to let me create a syndicate for Dunce Deals readers. If you are interested, send me an email and I can give you details.
Deals
Hallo
Description: cohort-based language learning
Website: https://www.hallo.tv/
Founder: joon beh
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joon-beh-65369764/
Email: joon@hallo.tv
Stage: Seed
Raising: Maybe
Current Dunce Investment: YES
Notes: OK, I get a lot of grief from readers that miss the field above and say ‘Hey, when did you invest in $X.’ So this is my ‘Hey friend, I’m investing in Hallo’ notification :) Here’s what I like about Hallo. Only word of mouth has generated hundreds of thousands of active users. Joon is a very good listener. That said, we have so much to do to find PMF and make this into a great company. If you are interested in investing, let me know and I will do my second syndicate of the week.
Lancify
Description: Training the freelancers of tomorrow.
Website: https://www.lancify.net
Founder: gowtham sundaresan
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gowtham-sundaresan-845040111/
Email: gowtham@lancify.net
Stage: Pre-seed
Raising: Yes
Current Dunce Investment: Evaluating
Notes: Note the field above. Evaluating means I am spending time with the founder and trying to understand the business. Assuming you take that as some kind of signal, it’s probably your queue to take a look and talk to the founder. I am going to try to do syndicates when I invest, but really no guarantees, so be pro-active if this is a space that matters to you. On Lancify, what I like about the deal is that Gowtham is being incredibly strategic about the kind of things he’s training people to do to get gigs, stuff like becoming an expert in Webflow or Shopify and all the modern tools that people need help with.
Ello
Description: Ello listens to your child read from real books, teaches and motivates them, and transforms them into enthusiastic readers.
Website: https://www.helloello.com
Founder: Tom Sayer
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-sayer/
Email: tom@helloello.com
Stage: Pre-seed
Raising: Yes
Current Dunce Investment: No
Notes: As a former reading teacher, I’m a sucker for anyone building tools that help young kids read better. Tom has a very interesting take. Ello ships a box of physical books to each child. If they run his app while reading, it listens to them and gives them coaching. Pretty cool! And to be clear, when this field says ‘No’ above, I do about a dozen inbound pitches a week from about 100 founder requests, so showing up here means I liked it a lot, and ‘No’ can turn to ‘Yes’ very quickly if they figure some things out. So if this is a space you like, be pro-active :)
Here is the complete list of Dunce Investments:
Mystery Science - purchased by Discovery Education 2020
Swing - on-demand talent for the education market
Epic! - the best children’s books digitally for every classroom and every home
Kunduz - the leader in test prep for Turkey
Erudifi - loans for students going to vocational schools and higher ed in SE Asia.
Outschool - the best marketplace of live small classes for your k-12 student
Juni - Coding, Math, and English instruction 1-1 and small group
Lambda School - teaching students to code and get jobs in great companies
LingoKids - English learning for young children
Padlet - a modern document creation and sharing platform
TinyCare - micro-daycare centers
SV Academy - teaching students tech sales and getting them jobs in great companies
Sora - a better high school, completely online
Prenda - micro-schools to unlock your child’s talent
Galileo - the first online world school
Beanstalk - live classes for young children
GetSetup - live social network for seniors
Primer - live academic and social network for homeschoolers
Contra - social network for freelancers
Fourthrev - run digital bootcamps for universities focused on in-demand job skills
Marketerhire - marketing experts from that you can rent
Abwaab - the best test prep platform in MENA
Supernow - live classes and clubs for elementary and middle schoolers
Maven - the leader in cohort-based courses
Prendea - live classes and social network for students in LatAm
Kritik - peer grading for higher ed
Major League Hacking - hackathons and fellowships for university students
Reforge - live classes on Growth for upskilling professionals
Synthesis School - learn problem-solving by playing video games
AI Camp - AI for ages 13-18 from Stanford pHDs.
Bindr - Silent study groups online.
The Explanation Company - Google for kids.
Omella - payments for schools, non-profits, and small businesses.
Geniebook - a personalized learning platform for Singapore and Vietnam.
Hallo - cohort-based language learning.