We are pleased to announce that Kortext has raised an additional £15m in investment funding from DMG Ventures to accelerate the delivery of its product roadmap, in partnership with its university customers.
The pandemic-led move to blended learning and more ‘remote-first’, distance learning has fast-tracked the demand for Kortext to enhance all aspects of its platform and delivery.
The platform is host to millions of eTextbooks from over 4,000 publishers, providing every student with their own personal study space, connecting them to their course, their peers, and their academics.
With thanks to the additional investment funding, this will help to deliver digital textbooks and other course materials to students seamlessly; inspiring smoother integrations into the university teaching and learning environments used today.
London-based DMG Ventures is an early-stage corporate venture capital firm, offering its media equity and influence to help build the next wave of businesses, backing companies such as Bricklane, Wowcher, and Cazoo – the fastest ever-growing UK tech unicorn.
EdTech is seeing a raft of recent investments as the industry has quickly moved to blended learning models. Kortext is at the forefront of this digital transformation, with demand for the Kortext platform rising 300% within the last year. Kortext’s CEO James Gray said:
Our key objective behind this round of fundraising is continued investment in the Kortext platform to help our Higher Education clients.
…The fact that students no longer have to buy their own textbooks is a real leveller in terms of equality of access to highly engaging, personalised learning content.
To support this shift, we are also working with both universities and the major global publishers to deliver the required learning content under new, innovative, and affordable models that help close the digital poverty gap by enabling students to study anytime, anywhere and from any device.
Dedicated to digital delivery, Kortext bases its delivery on the Microsoft tech stack and is the only eTextbook supplier with a Microsoft Teams app.
With Kortext’s increased demand, the investment will fast-track the platform’s seamless delivery and integration of digital textbooks and other course materials to students in the teaching and learning environment.
Due to the aforementioned increase in demand, there will be additional power required to support the next wave of digital delivery, with the creation of 50 jobs at Kortext, as well as the addition of DMG Ventures’ Paul Zwillenberg joining Kortext’s board.
Expressing his delight, Paul Zwillenberg said:
I’m excited by the opportunities being pursued by Kortext. The need for a tech-led evolution in the education sector has long been the dream.
The market conditions – addressing the COVID education gap and the need for a rapid move to blended learning – mean that the time for a UK success story like Kortext to really flourish is now.
But it’s also a sustainable investment: they have great fundamentals in place and great reach into a sector that they know well. I’m looking forward to working with James and his team.
Kortext listens to the needs of students through its student ambassador programme and adjusts its approach accordingly. The programme is quadrupling in size in time for the beginning of the 2021/22 academic year.
Ensuring Kortext caters to all academic and student needs, Kortext has recently welcomed doyen of EdTech and former VC of The University of Edinburgh, Sir Tim O’Shea on board in an advisory role, who has already made his mark by contributing his knowledge and foresight to the future of university.
