EdTech firm MyTutor has just bagged £5m from Mobeus Equity Partners, bringing its total raised to £10m.
MyTutor is an online platform which allows parents to search for a private tutor. The price of classes starts at £18 an hour.
Existing angel investors, including Clive Cowdery, founder of Resolution Foundation; Thomas Hoegh of Arts Alliance; and Stephen Welton, head of Business Growth Fund, also contributed to the latest round. It has been classed as the company’s second institutional raise.
Prior to that, MyTutor raised a £3m Series A in May 2017 and an Angel round of £1.8m in October 2015.
This fresh funding will support the company’s growth, as well as helping to develop the platform and increase the size of the team.
MyTutor was founded by Robert Grabiner, Bertie Hubbard and James Grant.
Hubbard, who also acts as CEO, commented on the raise: “Tuition agencies lack scale and cost efficiencies so tend to cluster in areas of concentrated demand, charge extortionate prices, or offer directory-style services that lack transparency and quality control. The whole system needs to be fundamentally rethought if we’re to make high quality support available more broadly.”
According to stats from the company, one in three school children in the UK now receive private tuition.
The company claims to work with over 10,000 families, schools and universities to ensure that more students can access quality one-to-one support outside of traditional public education, including partnering with over 240 schools and universities.
Hubbard continued: “We’re seeing triple-digit growth in demand for online tuition, versus double digit for offline. There will always be a place for in-person tutoring, but as you’ve seen with e-commerce, health and other sectors, the role of offline will diminish as parents look for greater choice, and are won over by the ease of scheduling, better prices, and the ability to play-back lesson recordings
“This round of funding puts MyTutor in a position to deliver the new, dynamic model the sector desperately needs.”
MyTutor handpicks the UK tutors that it features on its site, picking just one in seven of the applicants. The community now consists of more than 7,000 tutors, the company says.
The tutors deliver tutorials online, through live video chats. It also offers an interactive whiteboard with collaborative tools such as viewing documents simultaneously. Lessons can be scheduled and recorded, whilst parents are able to browse and meet tutors for free online before committing to paid lessons.
MyTutor state that students using MyTutor made more than three times the level of progress compared with those who hadn’t received tuition, improving 1.7 grades compared with half a grade.