Woot Math lands $1M series A funding from Foundry Group

BOULDER – Education-technology startup Simbulus Inc., which does business as Woot Math, closed recently on a $1 million funding round to help scale up its line of software applications aimed at helping students become algebra-ready.

Boulder venture capital firm Foundry Group funded the Series A round. 

Boulder-based Woot Math officially launched its product in October, but had been operating a year-long pilot program prior to that, which included about 2,000 students in the Boulder Valley, St. Vrain, Denver and New York City school districts. As part of that program, about 350 of the students participated in a controlled study to test the effectiveness of Woot Math’s applications.

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“We got beyond good results,” Woot Math co-founder and chief executive Krista Marks said Thursday. “So we were pretty pleased.

The Woot Math team isn’t new to the ed-tech space. Marks co-founded the company with Tom Fischaber, Sean Kelly, Brent Milne and Jeff Ward. Marks, Fischaber and Milne co-founded ed-tech company Kerpoof, while Kelly and Ward were early hires there. Disney acquired Kerpoof in 2009, and the crew remained there for about three years. Disney eventually closed Kerpoof last year as it moved to more of a mobile focus and shut down some of its other online offerings.

The five co-founders started Woot Math with a combination of their own money, a small seed round of funding and a $180,000 grant from the National Science Foundation that helped fund last year’s study. The company has about 10 employees counting the founders and contract workers, and plans to add a software engineer soon.

Foundry Group managing director Jason Mendelson joined Woot Math’s board as part of the new funding.

“The goal is to expand around what we’re doing, and the Series A will help us do that,” Marks said.

Woot Math has more than 300 teachers actively using the web and mobile-based apps in their classrooms for 7,000 students around the country. The apps, which have a particular focus on teaching fractions, are geared toward teachers, schools and districts rather than at-home use. Licenses for the software cost roughly $7 per student per year. And the program comes with a dashboard that provides analytics for teachers and screenshots of students’ work so they can see what problems students missed.