This means more successful businesses… but at the same time, more failures.
Here’s a quick list of 5 ed-tech startups that have shut down.
5 Failed Ed-Tech Startups
1) Rafter
Rafter was a textbook and course material provider for schools and colleges. The main reason for their failure was that Rafter had much competition from the start and it had to deal with both logistical, financial and market challenges from the onset.
Kno Inc. was a California based educational software startup that introduced double paneled e-textbooks. Despite having raised close to $80 million in venture capital the company quickly saw its chances of scaling up diminish drastically once Apple introduced its now iconic iPads and iPhones.
Tutorspree wanted to enhance the way tutoring is done. Tutorspree's vision of pairing up tutors and students to meet up in person so as to create and maintain a real connection was commendable but not practical, which provoked their failure.
Details of the startup:
Founders: Aaron Harris, Josh Abrams, Ryan Bednar
Country: United States
Started in: 2010
Closed in: 2013
Nº of employees: 50-100
Funding Amount: $1.8M
Specific cause of failure: Bad marketing
You can read more about Tutorspree’s failure here.
4) Notezilla
Ada is a 24-year-old trans woman who 8 years ago built Notezilla, the Wikipedia for High-School notes site after finding that her summaries about Shakespeare books were enjoyed by her partners. But she completely failed to find an audience for her business and had to shut it down.
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5) Community Coders
While in university, Kaito started Community Coders, a business that connected companies looking for web development and digital marketing services with high school students. However, as the months went over, it became difficult to close deals and the startup began to lose its course.
Details of the startup:
Founders: Kaito Cunningham
Country: Canada
Started in: 2018
Closed in: 2019
Nº of employees: 1-10
Funding Amount: None
Specific cause of failure: Bad marketing
You can read more about Community Coders’ failure here.
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That’s all for our list of ed-tech failed startups.
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