As Parents Scramble, Edtech Startup TutorMe Partners with Comcast — and Nearly 100 Other Companies
Oct 07 2020
It's boom time in the world of remote learning.
That's especially true for TutorMe, a Los Angeles-based company founded in March 2015 that provides students with tutoring resources with the click of a mouse. The company has signed nearly 100 deals with schools and companies since the pandemic began, its co-founder and CEO Myles Hunter said this week. Most recently, the startup inked a September 30 agreement with Comcast to provide online tutoring services for families of their employees in the broadcasting and cable television company's northeast division.
The Comcast deal is evidence of an appetite to improve work-from-home quality of life for employees who are also parents. The pandemic has forced many parents to re-learn school subjects from years ago in order to help their kids complete their studies.
<p>"It came about as a result of some HR survey work with employees that they were looking for a solution to help parents during the pandemic, and the region wanted to see whether this might be something that could work," said a Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas in an email. </p><p>In addition to partnering with companies to provide its services as additional employee benefits, TutorMe has also partnered with universities and school districts. It has seen rapid growth since the pandemic impacted the U.S. in March.</p><p>"We knew that online tutoring was the future and we knew it was going to be more and more commonly used as distance learning increased," Hunter said. "But (growth that) was going to take three years happened over the course of three months due to COVID."</p><p><a href="https://dot.la/ucla-anderson-forecast-2021-2647864119.html" target="_self">Economic downturns have always been a difficult time for business</a>, but it's also a time of accelerating and changing trends. Businesses like Uber Technologies saw immense growth in the years after the 2008 recession. The 2020 downturn appears to have favored <a href="https://dot.la/tag/biotech" target="_self">biotech</a> and <a href="https://dot.la/ok-play-app-for-kids-and-parents-2647442466.html" target="_self">edtech</a> <a href="https://dot.la/germfalcon-2646002579.html" target="_self">businesses</a>, and also sped up a turn toward <a href="https://dot.la/autism-robot-moxie-ai-2645867544.html" target="_self">robots</a> and <a href="https://dot.la/dronebase-losangeles-lockdown-2645747277.html" target="_self">drones</a>.</p><p>TutorMe has worked with hundreds of thousands of students across the country, primarily in the U.S. and Canada. It now partners with more than 150 schools and corporations, including Calexico Unified School District, Childcare Network and Blue Cross Blue Shield in Tennessee. </p><p>It works with more than 12,000 tutors on the site who teach everything from kindergarten to graduate school-level classes. Hunter said the teachers go through a robust vetting process to ensure their background with the subject matter. They're paid weekly for their services.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://dot.la/media-library/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNDQ3NDAwMy9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY2MzY3MzU4NX0.sabmpIuJbk0jl6RXj6Gu4Bm_PDpdQAHi4lQ37YlCkmw/image.png?width=980" id="301c0" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="e4427db7f5d8cf7d6c449b3ed1769e03" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">A view of TutorMe's desktop.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Courtesy TutorMe</small></p><p>To get started, a student goes onto the site and types in the subject he or she needs help with. TutorMe then takes them through a matching process to find the best tutor. The student can then decide whether they want to proceed with a specific tutor or try someone else. Students work with tutors in a lesson space that provides the resources anyone might need for an in-person lesson, including audio and video communications, plus editing resources for students writing code and papers. Students can connect with their tutors by video, audio or text.<br/></p><p>The company also unveiled a writing lab during the pandemic that lets students upload a paper or essay to get feedback from a tutor. As an added plus for educators, the TutorMe platform also checks for plagiarism.</p><p>For those enrolled at programs that have signed up with TutorMe for their students, the learning management system can determine the course they are coming from and connect them to a tutor on the subject in less than 30 seconds, Hunter said. The company raised $1.3 million in seed money from an angel investor in the United Kingdom and Jason Calacanis. In April 2019, it was acquired by Chandler, Arizona-based Zovio Inc., a public company.</p><p>As of this year, it has seen demand increase significantly. In the second quarter alone, consumer usage went up by 350% and use by schools and other partners went up 850%.</p><p>As a student at the University of Southern California, Hunter said he and his co-founders found external tutoring resources "prohibitively expensive," while campus tutoring limited students to a set number of classes that weren't always available and required you to go to a tutoring center.</p><p>The company was co-founded by Hunter along with Victor Kotseruba, Alex Convery and failed <a href="https://dot.la/genius-fund-collapse-2646865907/" target="_self">Genius Fund</a> co-founder Ari Stiegler.<br/></p><p>"Ari was part of TutorMe in its early days and helped raise money for the company; however as time progressed, it was better for Ari and the company that we moved in a different direction," Hunter said.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://dot.la/media-library/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNDQ3Mzk5Ny9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYyMjY2NTc5N30.C-6f4KhmONsaIuuDnKxpEAir1k-nLJYT9iU-c2Ce6VY/image.jpg?width=980" id="e662e" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="2e7cd3ab7883e918855d5066da3d9a3f" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">L to R: Myles Hunter, Victor Kotseruba (co-founder), and Egor Shakhov (product engineer) on Easter Island, Chile.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Courtesy TutorMe</small></p><p>The TutorMe website was the product of a round-the-world working trip taken by Hunter and a very lean engineering team, including a member or two hired in places like Moscow, Bali, Chile, the country of Georgia, and Mexico, where the cost of living is less expensive and so is the engineering talent.<br/></p><p>Hunter remembers wearing the same swim trunks and three tank tops for most of the time, while living in hacker houses where everyone spoke Russian. The team would code in the quiet of the night and then sleep during the day.</p><p>"When friends ask me 'How was Bali?' I didn't see much of it in the light," Hunter said. "I was there for four months and there were two occasions where we went to the beach during the day."</p><p>The team traveled from early 2016 through January 2018, when the company began to take off and Hunter needed to be in Los Angeles, he said.</p><p><em>___</em></p><em>Do you have a story that needs to be told? My DMs are open on </em><a href="https://twitter.com/latams" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><em>Twitter @latams</em></a><em></em><em> You can also email me at tami(at)dot.la, or ask for my contact on Signal, for more secure and private communications.</em>
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What began as a project to preserve the experiences of Holocaust survivors is now expanding to include a range of historical figures, and everyday heroes.
StoryFile announced last week it raised $2 million in funding, and expects to receive more in the coming months.
The Los Angeles based company developed from CEO and founder Heather Maio-Smith's desire, in 2009, to have a conversation with a Holocaust survivor. With her background in design for immersive experiences she knew she could figure out the technology to make it happen.
<p>"I wanted to be able to just have a conversation," said Maio-Smith. "I wanted my children, I wanted my grandchildren, to be able to have that same conversation that I was having with these people… And then in 2010 I started to really look into, 'ok, how can I do this?'"</p><p>StoryFile's artificial intelligence technology Conversa creates an interactive video conversation that can be preserved and prompted by users. The videos allow users to ask the interviewee anywhere from 50-250 questions about their history and experiences, even decades after the interview subject has passed away.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-youtube">
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<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">Welcome to StoryFile</small>
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</p><p>The pandemic has highlighted the importance of preserving these discussions for future generations.<br/></p><p>"COVID actually has not affected us at all. In fact, it's proved our case, especially when we talk about education," said Maio-Smith.</p><p>StoryFile hopes to capture and preserve interactive interviews with world leaders and people who changed society, as well as everyday people — including your grandparents —so the next generation can learn from their ancestors' experiences.</p><p>The company believes that if this technology works for important figures, it can also preserve and share the experiences of everyday people.</p><p>StoryFile launched in 2017, but the beta version of their app came out earlier this year. The company has worked on projects with large media partners including Time Magazine, who it charges for use of the technology. </p><p>The company is now working with Civil Rights-era Freedom Riders to record their experiences. And they hope their recent $2 million raise — as well as another $3 million that's expected to come by the end of this year — will help boost their platform.</p><p>"100 years from now, everyone on the planet will have a StoryFile," said Maio-Smith. "You don't know what anyone's going to accomplish in their lifetime. So anyone will be able to look to find a person on StoryFile, and actually just talk to them, ask them questions...You could talk to your mom or your great great aunt who came to this country and talk to her about her experience coming to the country and what she did."</p><p>The company hopes to use the new funds to expand their technology and launch their app on both iPhone and Android platforms.</p>
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This Test Prep Service has a Cult Following Among Med Students. Soon it Will Have an Animation Studio
Sep 24 2020
The unnamed king wears a crown and large pink robe as he grasps a tissue to his nose.
No, this isn't some Netflix show on the quarantine lives of the rich and famous; it's actually a method SketchyMedical uses to help students recall complicated concepts.
Such images by Los Angeles-based online education startup SketchyMedical have helped catapult the company to cult status among the med school set, who dress up in their drawings for Halloween. One fan even got a tattoo of SketchyMedical's pencil representing penicillin.
On Thursday, SketchyMedical announced its first outside investment stake, a $30 million shot in the arm from former Hollywood executive Peter Chernin's investment firm TCG to help establish an in-house animation studio that will bring to life those famous sketches and expand its team of 30 employees.
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</p><p>The funds will also help SketchyMedical bring its symbolic characters and scenes to other health professions, as well as create new ones for students preparing for the MCAT in the short term and new subjects like law over the next few years.<br/></p><p>"We are reintroducing this method in modern education that's really been lost, and the students have noticed, and it works and they're using it," said CEO and cofounder Saud Siddiqui. "We're really looking forward to expanding our reach, making this accessible no matter what they're studying."</p><p>SketchyMedical's success is part of the recent trend toward the consumerization of education — a trend that has been rapidly accelerated by the pandemic.</p><p>Students pay thousands annually for medical entrance and licensing exams, flocking to big name test prep companies and paying thousands more to prepare. As the internet has provided myriad more ways to connect and learn, it's become a buyer's market for students looking to differentiate themselves from their peers and ace those exams. </p><p>The company was founded by medical students for medical students in 2013 after its four co-founders used similar techniques with great efficacy while preparing for their board exams.</p><p>SketchyMedical has been profitable since its early days through its subscription model, which offers tiered pricing — from roughly $230 to $550 for up to two years of programming — that includes video lessons, review cards and quizzes. The company currently has more than 30,000 active subscriptions.<br/></p><p>Sketchy Medical relies on the "memory palace technique," from an era when oral tradition meant memorizing long stories passed on from one generation to the next. Med students are given a simple visual way into the material through characters, storylines and humor. </p><p>For example, in one sketch <em>a naked Mona Lisa sits in a red-colored bathtub by the fire, petting a dalmatian and holding grapes.</em></p><p>She represents the bacteria known as pseudomonas aeruginosa, which thrives in aquatic environments and is classified as a gram-negative bacilli. It produces a fruity grape-like odor when plated and has swarming motility</p><p>In another four-minute coronavirus lesson, the crown represents the "coronaviridae" family of RNA viruses, the robe represents the fact that it is enveloped, while the tissue represents how they cause the common cold. The image shows up in pictures whenever a coronavirus becomes relevant.</p><p>Siddiqui said the company found students had a 30% improvement in recall using its method. Anecdotally, he said even the non-medical artists at the company are getting 100% on the preclinical quizzes from working on the images. </p><p>Cofounder Andrew Berg, speaking in front of a Zoom backdrop featuring the company's pencil (penicillin) drawing, said professors across the country have also integrated the company's sketches into lecture slides. </p><p>And Siddiqui said the company has seen more institutions using SketchyMedical during the COVID-19 pandemic as they've tried to find creative ways to supplement their traditional lectures.</p><p>"We argue that everybody is a visual learner, that our brain has evolved to be really good at visual spatial recall," Siddiqui said. "It's necessary for survival to know where that fruit grew or where that dangerous predator was, or our cave. This is the same for animals. This bird can remember the location of 30,000 seeds across the landscape."</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-youtube">
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</p><p>TCG vice president Michaela Venuti said the consumer-focused investment fund has been diving deep into the education space for the last year and a half and seen students take ownership of their education, picking and choosing among a wealth of new products tailored to their interests, area of specialty or aspirations.<br/></p><p>"Consumers can make decisions about what supplemental tools they want to use and build their own education," Venuti said. "A lot of that has been accelerated during the pandemic, and Sketchy fits well in this broader scheme of consumers choosing."</p><p>Venuti said TCG interviewed graduate and med school students as part of its work in the education space and 100% of the students they talked to mentioned Sketchy as a crucial tool to get through med school. That known brand name should help the company as it expands into other types of content and categories of education.</p><p>While it's hard to quantify exactly how large the market is for supplemental spending on education, TCG looked at another early leader in the direct-to-consumer space: Santa Clara, Calif.-based Chegg Inc. is a publicly traded company that began in the textbook rental space and now offers tutoring among other student services. </p><p>Venuti said she could certainly see SketchyMedical going the way that 2005-founded Chegg has, ultimately offering a suite of student services. <a href="https://s21.q4cdn.com/596622263/files/doc_financials/2020/q2/Chegg-Q220-Investor-Deck.pdf" target="_blank">Chegg reported 3.9 million subscribers</a> in 2019 and a current $8.7 billion market cap, but <a href="https://s21.q4cdn.com/596622263/files/doc_financials/2020/q2/Chegg-Q220-Investor-Deck.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">the company believes the total potential market opportunity for their services is 102 million students</a> in the U.S., Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. The company has seen a 39% compound annual growth rate over the last five years, and its total revenue of $153 million is up 63% year over year for the second quarter of 2020.</p><p>TCG believes Chegg's outlook on market opportunity is similar to what SketchyMedical could expect, Venuti said. However, she added that SketchyMedical's "secret sauce" is the content the company has built, its method for teaching students and its passionate and engaged user base.</p><p>An internal analysis by TCG estimated a total addressable market of 93,000 medical students and adjacent medical specialties like dentistry and pharmacology, who are already using SketchyMedical's content for studying overlapping topics. TCG also discovered an "ever-increasing amount of global edtech unicorns — such as VIPKid, Coursera, Duoling, ByJu's, Quizlet and more — with consumer-facing supplemental tools valued in the billions.</p><p>The analysis also found that in the medical school market supplemental tools are becoming so important that "<a href="https://www.ama-assn.org/residents-students/medical-school-life/why-some-medical-students-are-cutting-class-get-ahead" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">students are skipping class</a> to instead <a href="https://www.statnews.com/2018/08/14/medical-students-skipping-class/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">study via supplemental learning tools</a>."</p><p>___</p><p><em>Do you have a story that needs to be told? My DMs are open on </em><a href="https://twitter.com/latams" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><em>Twitter @latams</em></a><em> You can also email me at tami(at)dot.la, or ask for my contact on Signal, for more secure and private communications.</em></p>
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