This is a great day and a milestone for Udemy, the Academy of You, as they secured a $1 million USD seed round and have attracted a group of well known American investors, two seed funds and the others act as private investors.
I also see it as a good day for online education itself and a positive sign for other startups that are looking for funding.

Gagan Biyani, one of the co founders of Udemy, was so kind to sit down with me for an interview. His insights and practical advice are highly interesting for those amongst you who are interesting in the process of getting funded and how it all works as well as the gain of general knowledge on how to attract investors, the time frame and the role investors might then want to play in the company. Interesting to me was also the fact that Udemy did not get funded by people who usually invest in education quite the opposite is true. The group of investors have all an impressive record of investments into consumer Internet companies.

The Udemy team invested the last months of their work to build the community, they now have around 1000 course creators and about 2000 courses.

Although Gagan could of course not disclose details on the funding itself, he told me that they will use some of the money to grow the team with some new developers. All in all I think we will hear a lot of news from Udemy in the coming weeks and months. Being without a doubt one of the hardest working startups in online education I wish them all the best on their exciting way and to use the money sensibly which I’m pretty sure they will!

Investors in Udemy include Keith Rabois, Mark Sugarman’s MHS Capital, Rick Thompson, Russ Fradin, Benjamin Ling, Larry Braitman, Jeremy Stoppelman, Naval Ravikant, Paul Martino, Josh Stylman and Dave McClure’s 500 Startups Fund. Udemy’s fundraising was extremely successful due to help from Adeo Ressi’s Founder Institute and VentureHacks’ AngelList.

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EDUKWEST #36 with Gagan Biyani of Udemy

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In my interview Jani Pentinnen, CEO and one of the Xiha founders, and I talk about what has happened since the humble beginnings 3 years ago as basically a small community of expats in China and Chinese people into what Xiha is today; almost 1 million strong in users numbers and people communicating with one another from about 200 countries worldwide.

The Google translator option was integrated on the site more or less a year ago and Xiha users can currently communicate in 50 different languages.

For about a week you are also able to import your Twitter and Facebook streams on Xiha and therefore not only understand when your friends write status updates in a language you both speak but also communicate with their friends in a language you might not speak yourself.

Moreover, the site allows you to play social games you pay for with a virtual currency, you can keep a blog or share photos.

All in all, a very nice network to be in when one is generally interested in languages and other cultures or countries.

I am on Xiha myself and find it fantastic, so when will you be?

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EDUKWEST #35 with Jani Penttinen of Xiha Life

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I have been connected with Tom for about two years now and I am following his way on Twitter and his Educator’s PLN. I am convinced that it can only be benificial for the whole industry when we start discussing with one another, sometimes controversial and not having the same opinion but always in a respectful way as we all want to change education as it shows today.

Both, Thomas and I think it cannot be healthy to only repeat established opinions and wear down the stones but to get a bigger picture it is inevitable for an educator whatever his / her background may be to connect and learn and engage with the others. Thanks to internet, Social Media and initiatives like the weekly #edchat on Twitter this has become far easier and therefore we see things happen today that seemed impossible three years ago.

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EDUKWEST #34 with Thomas Whitby of The Educator’s PLN and #edchat

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I had the pleasure to test the app before its launch and I was immediately dragged in by the fun it simply made to play the different games. According to Jeff this is a feedback they get all the time: you don’t notice that you are actually learning Spanish because the different mini games are so engaging. For me this is one of the startups you should put on your watch list and if you are teaching Spanish you should recommend the app to your students and they will enjoy learning vocabulary this way for sure.

Jeff told us about how it came all about, how the founding team moved to Philadelphia to join an incubator and work on the prototype, how they build the app in only 10 weeks and what they are planning for the coming months including a move to San Francisco / Bay Area and get some funding to grow their startup.

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EDUKWEST #33 with Jeff Evans of MindSnacks

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emagister was founded in Spain already 10 years again and since then made up its way to the world leading education platform. Christopher joined the company in 2004 for the first time right when the global expansion of emagister was launched. After working at Sclipo Chris returned to emagister in 2009 and works on the communities since that time.

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EDUKWEST #32 with Christopher Grant of emagister

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We had the following topics on our list:

1) The launch of the iPhone 4 – has it the potential to be a device for online teaching?

• KirstenWinkler.com: Three years of resistance – Why I will finally buy an iPhone
• CNET: Skype confirms wants FaceTime with Apple’s iPhone 4

2) Textbook Rentals – is Chegg a money printing machine like TechCrunch writes?

• TechCrunch: TC Teardown: Chegg is a Money Machine

3) the Kno – will dedicated devices for education work or will mainstream devices like the iPad win the market?

• D8 Conference: The Kno Demo

4) Recent Fundings in online education – Schoology and Lingueo

• TechCrunch: Schoology raises $1.25 Million for Learning Management Software
• KirstenWinkler.com: French Language Teaching Platform Lingueo receives Funding

5) TeachStreet – a turn around from freemium to premium service in 5 steps.

• TechCrunch (Guest post Dave Schappell): 5 Tips to Transition from a Free to a Paid Service

Audio only:
review:ed Episode #4 with Dave Schappell

Related Links:

• review:ed Episode #1 with Dave Schappell of TeachStreet
• EDUKWEST Episode #13 with Dave Schappell of TeachStreet

We talked about how the process of finding investors went and of course their plans on how to invest the money into the growth of their company.

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EDUKWEST #31 with Guillaume Le Dieu de Ville, Arnaud Portanelli & Johann Querne of Lingueo

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Similar to other language learning communities like Livemocha, Busuu or Babbel hello-hello offers a free community where people from around the globe can meet each other, do language exchange and correct each others exercises.

What makes hello-hello different from its competitors is that the courses are developed in partnership with the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages and that the platform offers its premium courses on the iPad. The first course was even included in the launch version of the iPad store and made it up to place number 2 in the education category.

During the interview Sarah tells her really interesting story and gives us some great insights about how the idea was born, what made her decide to go all in on the iPad when she first saw the device and about her plans to grow the company in the near future.

hello-hello is entirely self funded and you will see how far real passion for a project can bring you.

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EDUKWEST #30 with Sarah Gontijo of hello-hello

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Darien and Jon explain how the idea was born during Darien’s studies in South Korea and both worked on the idea later on to turn it into a scalable product. They gave us also some very detailed insights on the South Korean ESL market and explained how they are going to target this niche of conversation lessons.

YongoPal recently won the UW Business Plan competition and received a price over $25k. The team is also currently raising funding.

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EDUKWEST #29 with Darien Brown & Jon Hickey of YongoPal

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Chris and I talked about

• The Groupon CityDeal deal and its impact on European start ups according to funding.
• If Udemy is a copy cat of Sclipo or WiZiQ.
• If it is necessary to educate people on their privacy in the light of the ongoing Facebook privacy issues.
• How important is video content in online education?
• Do Ads interfere with online teaching when they are displayed during a lesson on Skype or anywhere else.

At the end of our talk Christopher gave a short overview about Emagister and I immediately invited him for an EDUKWEST interview to learn more about this company.

Audio only:
review:ed #3 with Christopher Grant

Related Links:

• EDUKWEST #8 with Christopher Grant of Sclipo
• EDUKWEST #3 with Harman Singh of WiZiQ
• EDUKWEST #25 with Gagan Biyani of Udemy