Penn-founded Coursekit raises $5 million

Tom Paine


Coursekit, which was founded in 2010 by CEO Joseph Cohen and two others at Penn, just announced it has raised $5 million to continue the rollout of its "social learning management system". Investors in this round include Social+Capital (started by former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya), David Tisch, Joel Spolsky, IA Ventures, and several angel investors. Last year it had raised $1 million in seed funding led by IA Ventures and Founder Collective and moved to New York.

Coursekit joins several other new players in the LMS market, including other venture-backed startups, large education market player Pearson PLC, and open source tools such as Moodle and Sakai. They are taking on entrenched market leader Blackboard (recently acquired by Providence Equity Partners) among others. Coursekit's emphasis is on social collaboration among class participants, and for now seeks course by course adoption rather than institution-wide deployment.

I wrote about Coursekit last month. It started at Penn as a small project to replace paper-based course syllabai.



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