Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is putting his money into another start-up. But don’t go preparing new selfies just yet, this one is to help kickstart education, not distract you from yours.
Zuckerberg’s Startup:Education venture co-led a $4 million seed funding of Panorama, a company that says it provides the only survey and analytics platform specifically designed for K-12 schools.
“Our schools weren’t using feedback from teachers, parents, and students effectively,” explained Panorama co-founder Aaron Feuer, who launched the platform while still an undergraduate student at Yale.
“There was a missed opportunity to understand everyone’s experiences and learn what was and wasn’t working,” he continued. “That data is extremely important when addressing issues such as parent involvement, bullying prevention, school safety, and student engagement. So when I was in high school in Los Angeles, we led a statewide campaign to use this feedback in education,” said Feuer. “We quickly realized that our school leaders wanted the feedback too, but they did not have an easy, affordable way to collect data, analyze the information, and take action. We decided to build that technology for public education.”
According to Feuer, Panorama plans to use the proceeds from this seed round to launch a new free tool for individual teachers and to add new data analytics features to its platform.
Panorama’s platform is used in more than 4,000 schools and serves more than one million students. Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan founded Startup:Education with a 2010 $100 million investment in Newark, NJ schools.