Knowbox China has just closed its Series D round at May 30. At the company’s sixth funding round, Alibaba came up as the one and only investor. The China tech giant invested no less than $150 M to the startup.
What you need to know about Knowbox
Liu Ye founded his company back in 2014. It was his first move after he resigned from his previous company due to a misdiagnosed multiple myeloma. The then sentenced 5 year survival rate gave him the courage of taking a new step and started a new life.
Usually, educational tech startups focus on giving private tutoring and after-school classes. But Knowbox is different. Instead it focuses on providing homework for student and connect them to parents and teacher through its platform. It targets those who go to public schools.
Using the app, parents can monitor their children when they do their homework. Teachers can check the students’ works real time. Using photos, teachers are also able to correct the students’ works.
The startup uses AI technologies including knowledge maps and personal recommendations. That way, students can get personalized question based on their homework performance and progress.
To match the content with current China’s public school curriculum, the company has a team consisted of 300 staff. One third of them are former teachers. The team focus on producing homework-based content for the students.
Not only an internal content producer team, Knowbox also collects data from students and teachers on its systems. There are more than 27 million students and 2 million teachers that help to refine the AI content systems.
By December 2018, more than 70,000 public schools in 31 provinces of China use the homework platform. That counts for about 70% of the total public schools in the country.
Previously, Knowbox has raised big money from many investors including YF Capital, Legend Star, TAL Education and Richard Liu. It has raised $305.8 million in total.
