EdCast, an edtech company built on top of OpenEdX, has closed its series A round with funding of $6m. Stanford’s StartX fund participated in the round, which was led by Softbank Capital and also included Mitch Kapor of Kapor Capital, Menlo Ventures, Novel TMT Ventures, Cervin Ventures, Aarin Capital, and NewSchools Venture Fund’s accelerator CoLab.
EdCast’s product, Knowledge Cloud, is a platform which allows higher education institutions, enterprises and governments to create and run their own massive open online course. The underlying technology is OpenEdX, the open-source version of Harvard University’s and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s edX platform, which allows students all over the world to take university courses online.
The company will use the series A cash to advance its product development and drive growth. Currently, 39 universities use EdCast, but the company is hoping to expand this to 200 institutions in the near future. Its ultimate aim is to create a “multiversity” where different institutions collaborate with each other and students can choose the courses that suit them best.
Indeed, the investment news follows the announcement earlier in September that EdCast is working with the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network. The company will offer interconnections between more than 200 institutions on its platform, so that students at the participating universities can work out a comprehensive treaty on climate change. That project is overseen by Jeffrey Sachs, professor at Columbia University.
Karl Mehta, founder and CEO at EdCast, said: “With EdCast, we will 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 US and around the world.”
