- Educational technology company GoPeer — a company that pairs vetted college students with K-12 students for virtual tutoring lessons — announced that it has closed $2 million in a seed round of funding led by angel investor Ed Baker
Educational technology company GoPeer — a company that pairs vetted college students with K-12 students for virtual tutoring lessons — announced that it has closed $2 million in a seed round of funding led by angel investor Ed Baker (former VP of Product and Growth at Uber and previously Head of International Growth at Facebook).
Other investors in this round include Javier Olivan, Vice President of Growth at Facebook; Deborah Quazzo, Managing Partner at GSV Ventures; Daniel Graf, CEO of Mindstrong; Josh Hannah, CEO and Co-Founder of Flutter and General Partner at Matrix Partners; Aaron Schildkrout, Previously Head of Driver Product at Uber; Chris Protasewich, Chief of Staff at Freshly; and Tom Medrek, Will Weddleton, George Gong, investors at Launchpad Venture Group.
This funding round will power GoPeer’s product-driven growth and fuel its innovative platform, prioritizing teaching, accessibility, and analytics. And at a time when families are coping with school closures, GoPeer has been able to support students overcome many of these challenges.
Through GoPeer, families get unlimited tutoring at $20 per hour — which is 1/3 the national average cost and tutors keep 100% of their earnings. And K-12 students use GoPeer to complement their existing curriculum assigned by teachers.
College students help deliver this curriculum with GoPeer’s virtual classroom in an easy-to-understand way. So far, the company has served more than 16,000 K-12 students in more than 150 subjects and over 10,000 college students are on the platform.
GoPeer was launched in 2017 by Ethan Binder, Zura Mestiashvili, and Erik Laucks from their dorm rooms at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. And the team believes that inaccessible education is fundamentally a cost problem.
The high costs of traditional tutoring are a barrier to entry for students — who wind up feeling neglected by supplementary education systems. And GoPeer aimed to solve this problem by recruiting elite college students as educators, tapping into a world of talent. This concept gained widespread praise from families and undergraduates.
Students and tutors communicate through GoPeer’s secure online classroom with tools like real-time face-to-face video conferencing, photo/document sharing, and a virtual whiteboard/notepad to collaborate or edit essays.
In the past 3 years, GoPeer has met with and spoken with thousands of tutors and students to carefully refine its virtual classroom. And from the insights learned, the company has created the most versatile digital classroom that makes online tutoring personalized, effective, and collaborative.
With GoPeer, an online tutor offers the same face-to-face personalized tutoring experience as an in-person tutor but uses GoPeer’s state-of-the-art live learning platform to meet with students online.
KEY QUOTES:
“I’m extremely excited to be investing in GoPeer, which is bringing low-cost, high quality online tutoring to children all over the world. When my own kids started using GoPeer after the pandemic began, I immediately realized that Ethan and the team were solving a very important problem in a creative way that allows college students to earn money while helping K-12 students master new academic subjects.”
– Ed Baker
“If there is one thing we set out to do each and every day, it is building tools that turn our tutors into online teaching superheroes, bringing cost-effective and high-quality education to every kid in the world.”
– Ethan Binder, founder and CEO of GoPeer
