SmartestK12 announced an undisclosed venture round from UCLA Venture Capital Fund last week, which will propel the company through pilot testing their product in LA Unified School District starting in January. After that, the team of four aims to raise more funding to have a “full-blown product for beginning of next school year,” co-founder and COO Kevin McFarland, a UCLA MBA student, said.
The announcement of the initial funding came soon after the SmartestK12 team wrapped up the 2013 Startup UCLA summer accelerator and also a three-week edtech accelerator in New Orleans called 4.0 Schools. Through these programs, the team received countless mentorship and feedback, so now they can laser-focus on their assignment management product.
“Our entire focus is ‘test, test, test, refine, refine, refine’ until the end of the school year,” McFarland said.
In New Orleans though, the team had to take a step back from refining SmartestK12 since, for the first week and a half of the program, they weren’t even allowed to mention their company; instead, they just observed teachers.
“We just went to teachers and said, ‘What are your problems with how you handle assignments?’” McFarland said. “We just watched them for a week. We had to test out every single assumption we have about what a teacher needs; the only way we could test that stuff was taking ourselves away from our own product.”
The observations in New Orleans confirmed that the suspicions that SmartestK12 indeed does help teachers seamlessly assign content, then collect and analyze students’ results. One first grade teacher told McFarland that using SmartestK12 on her iPad allowed her to immediately realize that all of her students weren’t grasping the exact same concept; without SmartestK12, the teacher said it would’ve taken her a week of grading and analyzing to come to this realization.
This teacher’s feedback echoes exactly what co-founder Craig Jones discovered while working in LA Unified School District for four years through Teach for America: that, through easily diagnosing student assignments, a teacher could better individualize lesson plans and increase learning overall. Jones’s developed an early iteration of SmartestK12 using Google Docs and other tools available at the time, eventually bringing his students’ test scores to land within the top three percent in the state.
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SmartestK12 team with Startup UCLA director Robert Jadon
Once Jones got to Anderson School of Management, he started bouncing ideas off McFarland and then asked him, “Do you want to do this; do you want to make this a real company?” McFarland said.
So this spring, they got together a basic team, business plan and some wire frames for their application to Startup UCLA. By the end of the program, they ended up earning the "Most Promising UCLA Startup Company” title and positioned themselves to be a major player in the very crowded edtech space. But no matter how many competitors are developing tools for teachers and students, McFarland said, working in edtech is one of the most rewarding and refreshing places to be.
“Education technology is great because you have smart entrepreneurs who know it’s a business and, at the same time, want to fundamentally change the world,” McFarland said. “We think, ‘I am going to change the world in five years!’ But in order to get there, we really have to focus down on the core features and find that path.”
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