Skip to main content

With $3.5M In Funding, MathCrunch Wants To Provide Mobile Tutoring For High School And College Students



It’s tough to find a good tutor, and it’s even tougher to find a good tutor on short notice. MathCrunch is trying to change that, with a mobile app that provides on-demand tutoring for students at a low price. To pursue that goal, the company has raised $3.5 million in seed funding to expand and reach new users.

MathCrunch* hopes to provide a mobile marketplace that will enable students seeking help with their math problems to be matched with tutors who can guide them through the process and teach users how to solve them. The platform leverages two big trends taking place today: The first is the move to mobile messaging, and the second is the ability to enable on-demand connections with folks who have specialized knowledge and spare time on their hands.

In the case of MathCrunch, that means finding university students and teachers with knowledge of various different math subjects — like algebra, calculus, geometry, and the like — and pairing them with people who need help with specific problem sets. Students take a photo of the problem set and submit it via mobile app, and then the tutor opens up a chat session to help work them through the solution.

Students are charged by the minute, and can either purchase minutes or earn them by referring friends or sharing the app with friends in their social feeds. In doing so, MathCrunch is not only providing a way for students to get free or cheap tutoring, but it’s also creating a sort of viral loop that brings other users onto the platform.

Users can also purchase minutes, starting at $12 for 30 minutes of tutoring, $22 for 60 minutes, or $40 for 120 minutes of tutoring help. Tutors, meanwhile, get paid by the minute for the help they provide and can make themselves available at any time.

MathCrunch does the work of pre-vetting tutors by having them do a math test and then putting them through a 30-minute chat session with a senior tutor. Like other two-sided marketplaces, tutors are also evaluated based on the ratings provided by the students they help out.

While relatively new, the platform has had more than 100,000 successful tutoring sessions and has raised $3.5 million in funding from investors that include Floodgate Fund, Formation 8, Index Ventures, Sherpa Ventures, and Slow Ventures.

While it’s still early days, the company hopes to add new services and potentially add new pricing models, including a subscription service that would provide users with an unlimited number of chat sessions for a limited amount of time.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Samsung Galaxy S5 Review and Giveaway

Few smartphones are as aggressively marketed as Samsung’s Galaxy S5. The S5 can no longer be considered brand-new — but it  is  Samsung’s flagship, at least for the next few months. With a gorgeous screen, a capable camera, a waterproof build, and a user-replaceable battery, the Galaxy S5 has a lot to offer… at least on paper. Let’s find out how good it really is. What Makes This Review Different There are about a million Galaxy S5 reviews out there. Why should you read this one? Two keys points make our review different: We bought our own device . Unlike many tech blogs, we don’t use a review unit Samsung gave us. We went out to the store and bought one, just like you would. This means everything you read here is truly impartial – we owe Samsung nothing. We used it for more than a month . Some sites rush to be the first to publish a review on a new device. That’s not how we do things. I used the Galaxy S5 as my main (and only) Android phone for nearly two months,...
Read more

Samsung Galaxy Note 3 N9000 Review and Giveaway

When it comes to massive phones, nothing is more iconic than the Samsung Galaxy Note. It has gained popularity not only due to its size, but its additional features such as a stylus and a larger battery make it a more useful phone. Samsung released the third generation of the Galaxy Note in October, updating the phablet with a larger screen and improved hardware. Read through our review, then join the giveaway to win the  Samsung Galaxy Note 3 ! Competitors Of course, other Android competitors haven’t let the $640  Galaxy Note 3  be the only player in the phablet market. There are others such as the  Sony Xperia Z Ultra , the Samsung Galaxy Mega , and the other more common phones that are reaching 5″ screens such as the  Samsung Galaxy S4 , the  HTC One , and the  Nexus 5 . Unlike the normal-sized top contenders, the Galaxy Note 3 has a bigger screen and larger battery. It also offers specific features (surrounding the S Pen stylus) th...
Read more

Ex-Skypers Launch Virtual Whiteboard Deekit

Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a...
Post a Comment
Read more