Gojimo, an app that helps U.K. high school students prepare for exams, has been acquired by Telegraph Media Group, the publisher of The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph newspapers. Terms of the deal remain undisclosed, but from what I gather the Gojimo team are staying on and the company will still be run as a separate entity.
The startup’s shareholders included London VC firm Index Ventures, and JamJar Investments, the venture fund set up by the founders of Innocent Drinks, who both invested in Gojimo’s seed round. In a later round, father and son duo Robin and Saul Klein, Deborah Quazzo of GSV Advisors, seed-stage investment platform Firestartr, and the London Mayor’s London Co-Investment Fund also backed the company. Additional money also came via equity crowd funding platform CrowdBnk. Gojimo was thought to have raised around $3 million in total.
Available on iOS, Android and the web, the Gojimo app helps students brush up on various subjects ready to sit their national exams and offers thousands of curriculum-specific assessment items. In fact, it claims to be the U.K.’s number one exam preparation app, with over 65,000 revision questions for over 20 different subjects. The startup has also experimented with premium content from major educational publishers, such as McGraw-Hill Education and Oxford University Press, available via in-app purchases.
That the Telegraph Media Group, a leading news publisher, has acquired the company is noteworthy, if only because I get to juxtapose the following quote from CEO George Burgess, who founded the startup after dropping out of Stanford.
“We don’t have any serious competitors in the U.K.,” he told me in December 2015. “There is a lot of noise but few products of any quality. Some of the bigger publishers have tried their hand at mobile revision resources, but they’ve never understood apps. They don’t know how to market their products or understand freemium models”.
Cue canned statement from Christopher Keller, Head of Group Business Development at TMG: “For more than 160 years, The Telegraph has empowered its readers through its rich and trusted content. This acquisition is another milestone in our strategy to engage new audiences and to empower more people to progress in life through the content we produce.”
[“Source-techcrunch”]
