With children stuck in Zoom classes and parents becoming de facto teacher-assistants, education has taken center stage at home and made edtech companies like Encantos attractive to some investors.
The Los Angeles-based book publisher-turned-edutainment company started by two couples aghast by the dearth of bilingual books has closed a $5.7 million seed round. The fundraise, which far exceeded the $2.5 million Encantos had originally sought, brings the company's total fundraising to $8.5 million.
"I think people are really troubled by what's happened in education," chief executive Steven Wofle Pereira told dot.LA. He said that as parents have found it unsustainable to have a kid learn for eight hours a day on the computer, new approaches to education are increasingly in demand. The company, Wolfe Pereira said, has had "a phenomenal year of growth," although he didn't provide specifics.
Encantos bills itself as diversity-oriented entertainment, grounded in education and pedagogy focused on literacy, learning and life skills.
The company offers a combination of digital and physical products. For example, its app "Canticos," which roughly means songs in Spanish, aims to get young children Kindergarten-ready in two languages. It has complementary flashcards to provide "Montessori-style" reinforcement and also bilingual song books such as "Little Chickies / Los Pollitos."
As the pandemic exacerbates the economic divide, Wolfe Pereira said he's motivated to reach the families and children that are getting left behind in school.
"The gap is widening exponentially. It's very concerning – it impacts families and all of America," he said.
Wolfe Pereira said the new funds will help Encantos expand its subscription business – both for its digital app and an accompanying box of physical products. The company aims to eventually derive about 80% of its revenue from those subscriptions, with the remainder coming from content licensing and merchandise sales.
It also is beefing up its C-suite with two new executives as it prepares to double its staff of 15. Julie Fleischer, a former executive at WW, was named chief growth officer and Taylor Margis-Noguera, a serial entrepreneur, is now Encantos' chief operating officer.
The fundraising round was led by Precursor Ventures, with participation from Angeles Ventures, Concrete Rose Capital, Metrodora Ventures, Next Play Ventures, Portfolia's Rising America Fund and Revolution's Rise of the Rest Seed fund.
Editor's note: dot.LA's founder Spencer Rascoff is also an investor in the round.
When Noramay Cadena opened the bilingual children's books she had been gifted after she gave birth to her son last year, she was quickly taken back to her own childhood in Mexico. The book featured a Spanish-language lullaby, "The Pin Pon Song", about a cute cardboard doll, which Cadena described as both extremely silly and culturally significant.
"That's when I knew this was content that was by the community, for the community," she said. "As a user, I was really blown away by how they combined entertainment with education." She also thought the quality of the books was far higher than what she'd expect from what was then an early-stage startup based in L.A.
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Bilingual Publisher Encantos Raises $2 Million to Launch Subscription Box, Expand Spanish Content
A then-tech executive at Oracle in 2015, Steven Wolfe Pereira was a new father and wanted to do some more meaningful work. So with his wife, who had run Twitter's multicultural market strategy, and their two good friends, they began pitching an idea of a bilingual children's book series to publishers.
"I was aghast at the responses I was getting," he said. "They were like, 'Latinos really don't read'. It was really insulting."
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