Last week on The Disruptors, co-host Bruce Croxon sat down with Mike Silagadze, the CEO and co-founder of Top Hat, to talk about how the company’s platform improves the classroom experience for students using data, and Top Hat’s future plans on the heels of its $29.5 million Series C.
Top Hat’s cloud-based platform aims to help university and college professors integrate digital experiences into their teaching. Students can connect with Top Hat via their smartphones and professors can take attendance, deliver course content, and administer engagement activities.
When Croxon asked about how Top Hat plans to use the large amounts of data it has access to, Silagadze said data retrieved from Top Hat can help professors improve their course material and make specialized plans for struggling students.
“We have…highly predictive data that’s very useful for identifying students that might be at risk.”
“It’s certainly very exciting the amount of data we have access to. We know [if] students are showing up to class, do they understand what’s going on in class, are they doing their homework, when are they doing their homework?” said Silagadze. “We have complete information, which is highly predictive data that’s very useful for identifying students that might be at risk.”
Silagadze said it will use its Series C to bring Top Hat’s team to just over 300, and accelerate the development of new solutions for creating and distributing academic content.
“One of the biggest things is expansion. By the end of this year, we’re going to be over 300 people. So we’re going to be hiring sales, engineering, customer success, finance…basically everything, and we’re going to go aggressively after this market we’re trying to disrupt.”
Watch the full interview below:
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