The Idea

TeachPitch is a cloud-based learning platform designed to help teachers and schools discover and manage the best online learning resources. We believe that the rapid growth of the Internet and technology has created an abundance of learning material making it increasingly difficult for educators to find the most relevant material at the right moment in time.

The platform offers a range of functionalities, allowing teachers to discover, save, rate, share and review the online resources they find. 14 months after its inception Teachpitch has grown to serve a community of over 10,000 teachers from over 100 countries. We are working with top education institutions including Sedbergh School, Harrow School and the Brookings Institute and have recently signed up two universities in East Africa. With your investment we wish to grow our team, continue the development of our product and increase our user-base.

Founding story

Our solution was founded in October 2014 by Aldo de Pape, a former teacher who during his teaching years became frustrated by the constraint for time and budget struggled to find and manage the best and most relevant answers to his questions among the abundance of learning resources, platforms and content already available on the Internet.

TeachPitch functions as a resources discovery tool helping individual educators to find the best available material as well as a resources management tool to help schools get organised.

The platform was deliberately conceived as a global community. Despite their cultural differences, Aldo discovered that teachers and schools around the world shared common goals and had common needs.

Progress & achievement

• 14 months since its inception Teachpitch is now serving over 10,000 teachers from over 100 countries. Growing rapidly in sign-ups each day.
• Growing list of partnerships with top education institutions (Sedbergh School, Harrow School, and the Brookings Institute)
• TeachPitch is nominated as one of the twenty most innovative and fastest growing eLearning companies in Europe in 2015. (EdTech20)
• Supported by World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) – accelerator in Qatar.
• Featured on TechCrunch, Virgin.com and in The Financial Times but also gained substantial attention in the non English-speaking media – such as in Le Monde, La Tribune, El Economista, Metro Indonesia and People’s Daily.

Business model

Currently the basic single user license is free.  Educators are able to sign up to TeachPitch and open their own personal library system that allows them to search, save, rate, share and review the most relevant learning links at the right moment in time.  This approach has proven to be very advantageous in getting traction among teachers and led to exponential growth of platform users.

From this rapid user growth we have identified three clear revenue flows:

Schools: Dedicated resources repository with educational functionalities fully catered to (re-)use of best learning material within a school.  A secured and private cloud based solution with annual license starting from £5,000 to £20,000.

Publishers: Dedicated website on TeachPitch giving our teachers direct access to commercial educational resources. The product is publicly available in the cloud with dedicated marketing support for an annual license starting from £1,500 to £10,000.

Teachers: Tutor services material display and advertisement for teachers who want to mentor/teach each other for an annual license from £100 to £500.

Funding to date

To date we have received £150,000 in equity investment and an approximate amount of £350,000 non-dilutive funding in the form of grants and in kind (Google, Macmillan Science & Education, the Qatar Foundation and Accenture).

Use of funds

30% of this raise will be used for the further development of fee paying products for our target customers (publishers, schools and institutions). We have already established commercial partnerships with renowned schools in the UK, publishers in France and institutions in Africa. They will be the first batch of customers to use the products.   

We seek to use 40% of our investment on the growth of the team, especially on a Sales level so proper commercial efforts of a dedicated force can help us to reach our commercial objectives.       

Next to expenditures on salaries, we will allocate 30% of this funding to marketing. Our focus will be to scale in the United Kingdom and will then look at overseas English speaking countries such as the US, Canada and Australia

Next steps

Over the next 18 months we wish to reach 100,000 active users, over 20 paying publishers, and over 40 paying schools.

The Market

The Big Numbers

The education sector, including expenditure on national education systems, is currently the second largest global market, after healthcare.

A UK government report on global education reports that the sector is forecast to grow by a compound annual growth rate of 7% per year over, resulting in a global market size of US $6.3 trillion in 2017 and within this, educational technology is predicted to be the fastest growing market.

In the US alone the market for Pre K-12 (pre kindergarten up to grade 12) non-hardware education technology is valued at over $8.38 billion in 2014. 

Recently published numbers reveal that in the first half of 2015 alone it is estimated that $2.51 billion was invested in education technology, which is almost a doubling of global investment numbers compared to the year before.

Where Does TeachPitch Fit In?

An analysis by the platform EdSurge published last July, categorises the secondary school market in three segments:

• Curriculum Products: Content tools that teach specific subjects and skills.
• Teacher Needs: Products that help teachers with classroom-related activities such as grading, classroom management and lesson planning.
• School Operations: Products that are designed to help improve the management of schools, teachers, students and parents, primarily for use by principals and other school administrators.

The unique positioning of our product is that it would solve the need both for individual teachers as well as for school operations.  

The available budget for this among the 13506 US school districts in 2014 was estimated around $3 billion. Public expenditure on education and training in the UK (measured over its 17,000 primary and 3,300 secondary schools) has also grown considerably over the years.

A variety of education reports have observed that the budgets of schools to acquire and use technology & online solutions to manage and train their teachers are growing year-on-year

Through our branding and product building we seek to grow globally. Even though we are already working with customers abroad, we focus on scaling from our success in the British market. 

We started with actively selling our product to the Head Master’s Conference Schools, a conglomerate of 275 independent (private) schools in the United Kingdom. 

TeachPitch is successfully engaging with two renown private schools (Harrow School and Sedbergh) which has proven to have a knock-on effect to similar learning institutions in the same chain. 

From here on, we aim to further scale into the UK; from the private schools market (>1200 schools) further into secondary (state) schools (3,381 schools).

Our primary focus in the coming year of operations will be to grow in Great Britain and from there on continue building on a structure that can also serve in other markets.

The Competition

Even though the idea of an online teacher’s community is not new, we belie we are one of the few that offers our users a genuine proposition to find learning resources regardless of their origin. The majority of our competitors on a platform level are publishers (such as TES) who have as their first motive to generate traction for content that they host.

TeachPitch is an aggregator of the best online education material. We are not in the business of generating any content itself not will it ever be. This agnostic approach has proven to be advantageous as it allows us to scale up on the level of the technology features we build not on the content we produce. We are in a privileged position to remainobjective in recommending teaching materials. This is why we have been able to grow so quickly.

The approach also allows us to work with other educational publishers, building them a dedicated presence on our platform as our Discovery Partners.  

Competitive products currently used within schools are proprietary solutions (e.g. a computer in a teacher’s lounge or a school’s own website) or enterprise heavy solutions (e.g. SharePoint or Google Drive). On a functional level these products are mainly focused on the storage of resources – not on their re-use, review, planning and collaboration (all features that our solutions would offer).

Our product is built from the ground up to serve the needs of schools and teachers. As we grow, we will introduce new functionalities very specifically knitted to the educational process, keeping us ahead of competitors that are more focussed on generic storage technologies.

In addition we aim to design our system to be compatible with other technology systems used in the school and classroom (Learning Management Systems and other storage systems) so we can fit in the schools technological eco-system.

Rewards

Share Types

Source: Icrowdnewswire