Top Hat, an education technology startup based in Canada, announced that it has secured a $25 million Series-C funding. They said that they are going to use it to transform the college textbook industry, a move that will bring them head-to-head with the top American publishers, such as Mc-Graw Hill and Pearson.
Mike Silagadze, Top Hat's founder and CEO, announced the good news on the company's blog. The latest funding from Union Square Ventures makes Top Hat's total capital to $40 million and the company's total value to $180 million. Aside from Union Square, other Top Hat investors include iNovia Capital, Golden Venture Partners, Version One Ventures, Emergence Capital, Georgian Partners, and SoftTech VC.
Silagadze said that when he founded Top Hat in 2010 together with Mohsen Shahini, their goal was simple - to make "higher education classrooms more engaging."
What Top Hat did was use the power of digital technology to bring cheaper and interactive textbooks to college students. Silagadze added that Top Hat is a testimony of the value of innovative and interactive learning tools in the classroom today. That's because students are looking for a much richer classroom experience while schools aim to improve the performance of their students.
Not only are Top Hat textbooks interactive but they also build relationships between professors and students. Through Top Hat, students become more eager to engage in discussions. It is reported that Top Hat has now 2 million students and 75 percent of the top 1,000 colleges in North America is using the platform.
Last year, the company launched their online content marketplace where professors can create their own content and sell them all over the world. One of these was Chris Bone, an assistant professor at the University of Oregon and also a co-author of an interactive geography textbook on the platform. His textbook is far from the traditional textbook many of us have used because it uses games and utilizes social media to teach students. The best part about these textbooks, however, is that it cost only a fraction of the price of traditional textbooks.
