MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--EdCast, a Stanford StartX company that creates Knowledge Cloud platforms for institutions, educators, enterprises and governments worldwide to collaborate with each other, today announced it has completed a $6 million Series A round of financing led by SoftBank Capital.
Other investors joining with SoftBank Capital are Mitch Kapor (Kapor Capital), Menlo Ventures, Novel TMT Ventures, Cervin Ventures, Aarin Capital, NewSchools Venture Fund/ CoLab, and the Stanford StartX Fund.
“We are excited to once again back Karl Mehta and his latest vision to transform traditional industries – in this case higher education – by combining the entrepreneurial spirit of Silicon Valley with the latest innovative technologies,” said Steve Murray, Partner, SoftBank Capital. “Karl is a proven entrepreneur and has built a great team committed to their vision for EdCast and its personalized learning networks to reshape the future of online education.”
“These investments represent a quantum jump to let data-rich and personalized Knowledge Clouds enable higher education institutions and top educators to deliver their content globally with sustainable business models,” said Karl Mehta, Founder & CEO of EdCast Inc. and most recently founder & CEO of PlaySpan, acquired by VISA. “With EdCast, we’ll see the rise of the “multiversity” where hundreds of campuses interconnected through public and private hosted clouds offer the best curriculum from major institutions in the U.S. and around the world.”
The Series A financing builds on an exceptional month for EdCast which earlier announced its first project with United Nations’ Sustainable Development Solutions Network, linking more than 200 institutions worldwide.
“We are thrilled with the capabilities of the EdCast Knowledge Cloud platform and its approach to open and scalable education,” said Mary Lou Forward, Executive Director of Open Education Consortium based in Newton, MA. “We have been looking for innovative educational solutions to help our 300+ institution partners achieve their vision for open education. The EdCast platform provides a tremendous amount of flexibility to satisfy our various use cases including blended learning, for credit/continuing education credits, paid/free, etc., and we’re especially excited about the multi-institutional collaboration and learning capabilities.”
The Open Education Consortium is a worldwide community of hundreds of higher education institutions, such as Madrid Polytechnic, Osaka University, the University of Cape Town, Delft University of Technology, Korea University and Michigan State University, committed to advancing the principles of open education and their impact on global education.
About SoftBank Capital
SoftBank Capital makes early and growth stage investments in companies that connect people, devices and the world. SoftBank Capital has been investing in category leaders in consumer and enterprise mobile, online advertising, ecommerce, social media and cloud computing since 1995. Its portfolio of current and past investments includes Buddy Media, BuzzFeed, Criteo, Fitbit, Huffington Post and xAd. To learn more, visit www.softbank.com.
About EdCast
EdCast is a personal learning network to enhance human ability to collaborate and learn across educational materials, instructors, students and employers. EdCast Knowledge Cloud™ powers online learning portals built on OpenEdX for world class institutions, enterprises, governments and non-profits to enable millions of students to collaborate with each other and learn. The team has a track record of building large-scale transformational technology and are passionate about the global impact of mobile and online education. EdCast is a Stanford StartX company backed by tier one venture capital firms. The company is based in Mountain View, CA with offices worldwide.
To learn more, visit http://edcast.com.
