#learncapital

This morning, social learning platform Edmodo announced $15m in new funding, co-led by Benchmark and Greylock. Matt Cohler from Benchmark and Reid Hoffman from Greylock will be joining Edmodo's board. 

The deal is a huge one for the company and for our firm, LearnCapital. Reid Hoffman - the founder of LinkedIn and investor in everyone from Facebook to Zynga and beyond - and Matt Cohler - one of Facebook's first employees - are some of the most important entrepreneurs and investors in the rise of the social internet over the last five years. Their investment is not only an affirmation of how central the social experience can be for learning, but an affirmation of the growing venture community interest in next generation learning platforms. 

Edmodo is a social learning network which gives teachers the ability to bring content from the web into a safe and secure communication platform for their classes. On the investment, Hoffman said: “Both Matt and I have seen networks grow spectacularly once they hit their tipping point. It’s clear to us that Edmodo is well on its way to becoming one of the key networks in our lives. Just as LinkedIn is the professional graph for work and Facebook is the social graph for your friends, Edmodo is the educational graph for learning. The graph provides the platform for teachers to bring selections of the web to the classroom…Edmodo is the third social graph network that Greylock has invested in, after Linkedin and Facebook.” (from TechCrunch)

The investment isn't just important for Edmodo or Learn, but a huge win for an educational technology space that is quickly maturing. This space is not a scary futuristic world in which teachers are replaces by machines and students are reduced to fact-reducing automatons, but a space in which technology gives teachers the resources to actually engage students with different learning styles; in which it becomes easier to hone in on specific problem areas, increasing student mastery and confidence; in which new vehicles for collaboration between parents, teachers and students become normal rather than exceptional; in which the cornucopia of information and knowledge beyond the classroom can find its way into the formal education experience, helping students understand why they're learning what they're learning. Ultimately, the new generation of education technology is about enabling our education system to live up to its promise of unleashing the talent and capacity of every student to do and achieve more.