Summary

Zzish is the first Edtech platform to give instant insight into students’ learning gaps, personalise content and scale up this data daily for school leaders and government. Zzish is rapidly scaling, hitting 200% growth and 2.8m students on the platform in 2019. Backed by two Chinese funds and three innovation grants, we are raising a closed investment round ahead of a Series A to capitalise on our strong early traction in the US and Asia.

The video which backed Zzish's oversubscribed 2018 raise. Hear the Founder's story, more on the problems we solve for teachers, alongside the dynamics of the rapidly growing Edtech market

The idea

The $252bn Edtech market is growing 17% each year, but is fragmented. With 200,000 education apps and over 4.5 million digital resources there is no easy way to know which are effective. Zzish's platform brings them together, maps them to curriculum goals, and ranks them by learning impact.

Our tech diagnoses for teachers what students are struggling with, then recommends content to help. By scaling up this real-time classroom insight to advanced big data dashboards, we help school and district leaders make timely interventions too. Our platform connects advanced mastery data across the entire education ecosystem.

Impact is promising. Our platform has shown 8-10% improvement in test scores in the US, with 96% of trialling teachers across a widespread survey requesting for their school to purchase.

Our business model is simple and scalable. Clients pay $3 per student per year for the insights and content recommendation platform and our big data dashboard, with the option to pay $20 to access all apps and resources in the pipeline.

Zzish is continuing to scale rapidly, with a peak monthly active usage of 220,000, growing 20% monthly in term time. We are about to hit an incredible milestone of 100 million assessment questions answered on our platform, but expect this will 4x in the next year with our growth plans.

In 2019 we entered 632 new school trials worldwide and are negotiating across 72 US School Districts. Our govt model is scaling too. Our regional government work in the Philippines has extended to a new province and we hope to scale up to a national deal in due course.

We have won numerous accolades in the tech and the education community. A few of note: We're a TechStars London graduate (one of 10 chosen from 1200 for the programme), Google named us in their “ten high growth startups in Europe” to present at their EU Demo Day, we were in the prestigious Varkey Foundation's Next Billion Prize, for their 18 best Edtech startups, and named by Techcrunch in the Europas ‘top 5 Hottest Edtech Startups' too.

Review the investment deck

Team

Charles Wiles founded Zzish to solve his son’s learning struggles. A family bereavement disengaged his son at school and with limited feedback from teachers Charles found it difficult as a single parent to provide extra support. He left his job as MD of a big data adtech firm, investing his life savings and tech expertise in founding Zzish.

Zzish’s leaders, some of EdTech’s most passionate pioneers, have raised £750k of grants and £3m from investors including Leaf Investments, Chengdu Horizon and 13 ex-Googlers.

Our team is bolstered by four brilliant ex-teachers who have taught in the US, UK, Thailand and Singapore.

Charles Wiles - CEO

Double First in Engineering from Cambridge, PhD in Engineering Science from Oxford & MBA from London Business School, Charles was Google’s first Product Manager outside the US. As MD at VisualDNA he raised $10m and grew revenue from $0 to $3m.

Chris Mathews - Chairman

VP of International Partnerships for Discovery Education

Daisy Hill - COO

Customer acquisition & operations for high growth ventures inc. Eventbrite. Co-founder of a music education start-up

Anurag Kapur – CTO

12+ years in tech - led engineering teams at Boston Consulting Group, Financial Times & News UK. MEng from Oxford