UK’s Atom Learning picks up $25M from SoftBank for an AI-based online learning platform aimed at elementary school-aged students – TechCrunch

The Covid-19 pandemic ushered in a brand new chapter for digital learning, giving a lift of consideration to current instruments and spurring the creation of latest companies and use circumstances as students of all ages had been ordered to remain dwelling and keep out of lecture rooms. Today, one of many startups that’s been a robust benefactor of that pattern is saying some funding to proceed its progress. Atom Learning — a London startup that builds AI-based online schooling supplies aimed at main aged (7-11 years) youngsters, their lecturers, and their dad and mom — has raised $25 million, cash that it’s going to use to proceed its progress within the UK market, to begin to look at plans to broaden internationally, and to proceed constructing out the information science and content material that it gives to its customers.
Specifically, Atom’s distinctive promoting level is that it builds schooling supplies that use machine learning and different AI instruments to adapt to a customers’ particular ranges of information; it additionally applies knowledge science to construct analytics and different instruments to educators and oldsters to additionally work in additional focused methods to encourage extra learning. All of those can even be getting extra funding.
The funding is coming from a single backer, SoftBank, through its Vision Fund 2, and Aton claims that this sum is the largest-ever for Series A spherical for a UK edtech startup.
It can be notable for being Atom’s first outdoors funding. The firm, based in 2018, had been worthwhile and bootstrapped up to now, and it’s grown fairly impressively within the final three years. Currently, Atom is utilized by 500 main (elementary) colleges within the UK, totaling some 100,000 students. (Given that there are some 22,000 main colleges within the nation, it has numerous rising left to do right here.)
Co-founded by Jake O’Keeffe and Alexander Hatvany, O’Keeffe tells me that the 2 had their first style of online learning once they labored as online tutors when nonetheless at college — very a lot a typical side-gig for undergrads within the UK, the place pre-university students face a battery of standardized exams as they undergo their years in class, which every set narrowing the sector for students and the place they may finish up for college, what they in the end examine, and primarily do with their lives.
(Indeed, as a father or mother of UK students who didn’t develop up right here, I can inform you it’s an excellent tense system that appears very far from excellent in all types of the way.)
Covering all ages and all topics, the pair rapidly noticed the shortcomings within the mannequin.
“We may see that no two non-public tutors had been the identical, even when the prices had been all the time excessive,” he mentioned. “We thought there was an alternative to construct a fully-automated platform to assist standardize the standard and the worth.”
They selected to deal with primary-aged youngsters, he mentioned, not solely as a result of there have been already quite a few online tutoring companies out out there for secondary-school students (aged 12-18), but additionally as a result of they believed that the basics of learning wanted to be addressed at a youthful age.
“If youngsters don’t study these abilities by the point they’re 11, it’s exhausting to get well from that when you find yourself older,” O’Keeffe mentioned.
The apparent place for Atom was to begin was online learning aimed at students. Specifically, it has constructed a three-tier mannequin aimed first at instructing students the fundamentals in line with the nationwide core curriculum (priced at £9.99/month); after which two subsequent tiers (£49.99/ and £59.99/month) aimed at students which are getting ready for senior faculty entry exams — a system right here within the UK for students going to non-public colleges or for sure grammar colleges.
Atom naturally advanced that then into content material for lecturers, with “query banks” for them to create higher learning supplies for students online and within the classroom, after which instruments for dad and mom to higher monitor how every little thing progressed. The adaptive aspect implies that the platform “reads” how students work to offer subsequent work tailor-made to every individual’s particular person degree, however it additionally implies that Atom can frequently amass suggestions on how these students are doing, helpful for Atom’s personal content material library evolution in addition to to create methods to trace pupil progress.
These days, there are actually numerous online learning supplies for all ages, an enormous content material trove made even larger within the final two years with so many colleges shuttering their doorways and turning to distant learning. That means not solely competitors for Atom, but additionally a plethora of pedagogical approaches round what may work greatest when it comes to buying information, retaining it, retaining youngsters engaged and so forth.
Kahoot, for instance, (one other SoftBank-backed firm) has borrowed closely from the worlds of gaming, user-generated/creator content material, and on-demand leisure to create what it has been described at occasions a “Netflix for learning”: an enormous library of academic modules, lots of which have been created by Kahoot’s consumer neighborhood, that are constructed across the dynamics of gamification to encourage and have interaction pupils in a topic. Others, resembling Microsoft’s tailoring of Teams for schooling or Zoom, are merely instruments to make it simpler for good old style people to attach over distant distances and work collectively on white-board model interfaces to show and learning.
For now, O’Keeffe mentioned that Atom is concentrated on persevering with to construct out extra content material to bolster the strategy it has taken: extra adaptive content material that enhances the work {that a} faculty trainer places in, with the larger intention being to guarantee that youngsters are, at the most straightforward degree, learning in line with the nationwide curriculum (as set out by the federal government), and hopefully, exceeding that and growing an urge for food to study extra.
That means: possibly some gamification someplace down the road, however not for now. But it additionally means: Atom is bringing non-public tutors into the combo quickly, too (proper now there’s a registration web page for early entry).
“The utilization of edtech and adaptive learning inside established curricula has accelerated quickly each in class and the house”, mentioned Yanni Pipilis, managing accomplice for SoftBank Investment Advisers, in a press release. “Atom’s proprietary expertise permits every youngster to progress at their optimum learning tempo, and gives dad and mom and lecturers with real-time suggestions on areas of power and improvement. We’re excited to accomplice with the staff in its imaginative and prescient to enhance learning outcomes for each pupil.”

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