Y Combinator Of Education Imagine K12 Launches Its 3rd Cohort, Bringing The Digital Revolution To Classrooms Near You | TechCrunch
Summary
That’s why, after encouragement from YC founder Paul Graham, former Yahoo and Google execs Tim Brady, Alan Louie and Geoff Ralston created Imagine K12 in 2011 — to provide a network of support for the next generation of young edtech companies. In Mike’s coverage of the accelerator’s launch, he called it the “Y Combinator for education startups.” Given Graham’s early moral support and similarities between the models, the comparison makes a lot of sense. Following the YC and TechStars model, Imagine K12 set out to find promising young startups, offering to support their early coding sessions and product testing with a little seed capital (ranging between $14K to $20K in exchange for an average of 6 percent equity), work space and coaching on everything from accounting to how to pitch investors. To do that, through a freemium membership model, the startup provides a curriculum, a library of instructional videos and in-browser programming exercises, along with a support system that gives students access to advice from experts. Securly wants to solve the “over blocking” problem in schools by allowing teachers to safely use Google, YouTube and Wikipedia in the classroom without subjecting them to inappropriate content, videos, search results, and so on.
