London edtech firm raises £19m in Series A funding round

A fast-growing adaptive learning edtech platform has announced it has raised $25m (£19m) in a Series A round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2.

SoftBank Vision Fund 2 will become the only private investor in Atom Learning. Since launching in 2018 Atom Learning has grown without external funding and is already profitable. This funding round is the largest Series A round ever secured by a British edtech startup.

The company’s aim is to increase standards across the education ecosystem by improving teachers’ workloads, enhancing children’s experience at school and equipping parents with a high-quality home learning platform.

Atom Learning, based in London, has developed two products for teachers and parents of children between the ages 7 and 11.

Atom Prime is free of charge and used by teachers in more than 500 primary schools. The product helps save teachers time by providing large banks of questions that can be turned into lesson plans or homework quickly and allows teachers to manage mixed ability classes via adaptive learning.

Atom Learning has grown into a team of 100 education and technology professionals. The team is staffed by former teachers and educationalists who create the online curriculum and ensure content is engaging and fun for students.

Atom’s platform balances the need to compete for attention with the mobile and games applications that 7 to 11 year olds use, with the importance of maintaining academic rigour. As a result, the product is highly interactive, built around world-class adaptive learning technology.

This uses AI technology to predict the probability a student has of answering a question correctly which allows teachers and parents to structure lessons in a format where every topic and question is challenging, but never demotivating, for children.

The investment will be used by Atom Learning to realise its ambition to be in every single primary school in the UK. The company plans to double headcount over the next 12 months, bringing on board more teachers and technology professionals to its London office, which operates as a fully remote and flexible team. Atom Learning will also expand into the US in 2022.

Jake O’Keefe, co-founder of Atom Learning, comments, “We are delighted to partner with SoftBank as we scale in the UK and internationally. They’re a natural partner due to their ambition and their commitment to edtech in Europe and globally.

“Our mission is to provide all children wherever they are and whatever their background with an affordable, high-quality education. We are doing this by combining exceptional teacher-made content with industry defining technology.”

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