EdSurge: Newsela Raises $1.2 M

Accelerator alum Newsela, the NYC-based startup that helps teach reading with news articles scaled at different skill levels, just reported a $1.2 million seed round led by NewSchools Venture Fund, with participation by Kaplan Ventures, among others.

Newsela was part of the inaugural Kaplan EdTech Accelerator that ran this summer.

From EdSurge:

Since its beta launch three months ago, the company has seen "ridiculously explosive growth," in the words of co-founder and CEO, Matthew Gross. Newsela has registered users in all 50 states and 60 countries. Gross is keeping mum on the exact user numbers but did share that "right now we have 400 teachers and 3,000 students signing up every day." 

CHI or NYC for startups? MentorMob weighs in on Forbes.com

Windy City vs. Big Apple? Deep dish vs. thin crust? Bulls vs. Knicks?

Add one more point of rivalry for denizens of these two great U.S. cities: "who's best for startup companies," New York's Silicon Alley or Chicago's Silicon Prairie?

Weighing in with their two cents is Chicago-based ed-tech company MentorMob, which recently "graduated" among the first class of the (New York City-based) Kaplan EdTech Accelerator.


As reported by George Deeb on Forbes.com:

MentorMob is a rapidly growing startup in the B2C education technology space.  The company was founded in Chicago in 2010, and was one of the first tenants of Catapult

Cisco's The Network: Verificient Technologies uses data to stop cheating

NYC-based startup Verificient Technologies―an alum of the first Kaplan EdTech Accelerator class―was profiled on the Cisco-sponsored blog, "The Network," for its use of "big data" to thwart online course cheating:

As online schools and courses become more popular, there remains a thorny question: How do you, say, make sure the people who take an exam really are the students they purport to be? Or, at a more traditional school, in a room packed with test-takers monitored by a remote proctor, how do you stop cheating?