Toronto’s Top Hat has raised a $10 million series B round from Georgian Partners.
Funny, we just wrote about the guy who founded the company but has since moved on to fellow Toronto startup Bionym. Andrew D’Souza told a crowd last week how he aggressively poached sales folk from big US startups. He obviously left Top Hat in good shape, because today is a healthy day for the education technology company.
Top Hat calls itself a “revolutionary teaching platform” that makes teaching effective and fun. It enables professors to present their lectures, annotate their slides, share their notes with students, ask questions in class, facilitate discussions, and grade their students.
‘We’re delighted to have Georgian Partners join the team,” said Top Hat CEO Mike Silagadze. “Top Hat can provide analytical insights that directly improve student outcomes.”
Participation in the round also came from existing investors Emergence Capital Partners, iNovia Capital, SoftTech VC, Version One Ventures, Felicis Ventures and Golden Venture Partners.
“The higher education sector is facing huge challenges in terms of student participation and performance” said Georgian Partners’ Justin LaFayette. “The Top Hat teaching platform is successful because it directly improves student engagement and is helping predict when students need help.”
The company said it will use the new funding to “accelerate” adoption of its teaching platform and extend its “product leadership”.
Originally developed as classroom engagement tool, Top Hat evolved into a full teaching platform that handles everything from content delivery to assessment and engagement. The startup recently extended its market leading mobile device support with a new teacher app that allows instructors to run their classes directly from their iPad including presenting PowerPoint slides, making annotations and launching questions directly from the app.
Top Hat will use the new funding to continue to further accelerate adoption of its teaching platform and extend its product leadership.