NEW YORK, NY — (Marketwired) — 03/26/15 — Socratic, an education company connecting millions of students around the world with useful answers to academic questions, today announced it has raised a $6 million Series A led by Shasta Ventures along with Spark Capital and Omidyar Network. The education startup plans to use the funding to enter a new phase of growth. It–s clear that , and Socratic aims to be the leading mobile and desktop platform students turn to for help.
Immediate goals include increasing subject areas from 12 to 50+ in the next two years, creating a mobile app, and developing better content creation and collaboration tools. By gathering data about what helps students the most, the developers hope to create new benchmarks for educational content.
“What if you had an amazing teacher by your side whenever you were trying to learn something?” This is the experience that Socratic, a New York-based education startup, wants to provide to students everywhere.
In the past year alone, Socratic connected millions of students around the world with useful answers to their academic questions. A dedicated community now answers questions in 12 subjects on a daily basis. One teacher in particular, Ernest Z, has with his contributions.
“In category after category we–ve witnessed professionally-driven publishers getting surpassed by community-driven publishers,” notes Sean Flynn, managing director, Shasta Ventures. “Academic knowledge is an important category and yet there is no definitive online destination. We see Socratic becoming this place.”
“At Omidyar Network, we support innovative models that challenge the status quo to deliver better outcomes for our children,” said Amy Klement, Partner at Omidyar Network. “Socratic complements conventional learning techniques and is well-placed to address the needs of learners by providing access, building and fostering a global community of students and teachers.”
Founded in 2013 by Christopher Pedregal (Product Manager at Google), and Shreyans Bhansali (Venmo–s 1st employee), Socratic began with three major insights. First, the founders noticed that students constantly turn to the Internet for academic help (and increasingly on mobile devices). Second, they don–t get reliable search results because educational content is fragmented, unreliable, and often outdated. Third, teachers and students who love teaching and learning don–t have a place to do it at scale online. Socratic was created to address these needs. The company is headquartered in New York, NY. Socratic had previously in a seed round that included Spark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, betaworks, and BoxGroup. For more information about Socratic, visit
Lisa Tarter
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