Knewton Secures $33 Million to Expand Personalized Ed

Knewton announced today the completion of $33 million round of funding, led by Founders Fund and Pearson, to accelerate expansion of the company’s Adaptive Learning Platform™.
The award-winning platform transforms third-party educational content by personalizing it to each individual student, allowing educators to remix any publisher’s educational materials. Adaptive Learning Platform maximizes student learning retention by optimizing the intersection between personal proficiencies and course requirements, helping educators better prepare students in class.
“Knewton is poised to become a global lynchpin in online education and, more importantly, to improve education for everyone,” said Luke Nosek, Managing Partner of Founders Fund. “We couldn’t be more excited about our investment.”
Returning investors include Accel Partners, Bessemer, Venture Partners, and FirstMark Capital. Throughout the last year Knewton and investors have seen dynamic growth. Knewton was selected as a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
“There’s a revolution brewing in education,” said Jose Ferreira, the company’s founder and CEO. “Between increased broadband and the rise of tablet computing, many more students are accessing their homework and even their classes online. In so doing they are producing unfathomable quantities of data. As the world leader in adaptive learning, Knewton can capture these data to give students a unique lifetime learning profile that dramatically improves their educational experience.”
“The demand for Knewton’s Adaptive Learning Platform^TM is high as it has grown past proof-of-concept and is now on the cusp of being widely used,” said David Liu, Knewton COO. “Right now, at schools like ASU, thousands of students are enjoying courses powered by our platform that automatically skip boring concepts students have mastered, and instead provide perfectly targeted lessons that have been optimized for media format and engagement. Initial results have been overwhelmingly positive, with students reporting that they are engaged with learning from personalized content, rather than all being forced through the same material.”
For more, visit www.knewton.com.