zyBooks Raises $4M in Funding

zybooks_logozyBooks, a San Francisco, CA-based provider of interactive digital learning products for the higher education STEM (Science, Technology Engineering & Math) market, raised $4m in funding.

The round was led by Bialla Venture Partners. In conjunction with the funding, managing member of Bialla Venture Partners, David Uri, will join zyBooks’ Board of Directors.

The company intends to use the funds for content expansion and addition of product features for both instructors and students, and new sales and marketing initiatives.

Co-founded in 2012 by Smita Bakshi, a former UC Davis Electrical Computer Engineering professor, and Frank Vahid, a Computer Science and Engineering professor at the University of California, Riverside, zyBooks provides web-native, interactive learning tools in STEM courses, with which students “learn by doing” in an action-oriented way. Content features question sets, animations, interactive tools, and auto-graded homework.
zyBooks, which features minimal text, question sets, animations, interactive tools, and embedded homework, are collaboratively authored by teams of professors, content developers and software engineers. Academic contributors include Roman Lysecky (University of Arizona), Sandy Irani (UC Irvine), and Andre Knoesen and Raj Amirtharajah (UC Davis).
Since its founding, more than 300 universities across the U.S. with more than 80,000 students have adopted zyBooks.

The investment follows recent grants from the National Science Foundation’s SBIR program awarded for research and development of the zyBooks platform.

FinSMEs

10/02/2016

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