PRESS RELEASE
October 14, 2020

Engageli Raises $14.5 Million to Build Inclusive Digital Learning Platform

Flagship Product Fosters Superior Teaching and Learning Experiences, Optimizes Student Success

PALO ALTO, CA – October 14, 2020 – Engageli, an inclusive digital learning platform, launched with $14.5 million in seed funding. The company is co-founded by Dan Avida, Stanford emeritus professor Serge Plotkin, Coursera co-founder and Stanford adjunct professor Daphne Koller and Jamie Nacht Farrell, a former executive at 2U and Trilogy. Engageli was designed to optimize student success and deliver engaging teaching and learning experiences across a broad spectrum of needs for higher education.

The rapid shift to remote learning, accelerated by the pandemic, is leading to considerable reduction in student success, impacting the most vulnerable individuals and further contributing to social inequality across education. Engageli is built to address these challenges head-on by:

Fostering deep engagement between instructors and students and course content, both in-class and online;
Creating a flexible learning environment that enables organic and seamless peer-to-peer collaboration and social interaction;
Increasing student and teacher success via unprecedented collection of analytics to improve the learning experience over time and;
Promoting an inclusive learning environment that is universally accessible and that enables instructors to interact with the students who need it most.
“We’ve created a platform, built from scratch, specifically designed to improve student success.” said Dan Avida, CEO of Engageli. “Human connection, interaction and inclusion are critical ingredients for engagement and transformative learning in any classroom and Engageli was built on those fundamentals,” added Daphne Koller, co-founder and board member of Engageli. “The Engageli platform gives students and teachers a place to communicate, exchange ideas, work out problems and learn content at a deeper level.”

The Engageli platform encompasses a host of unique tools, specially designed to enrich the inclusive digital learning experience, including table groups and dynamic breakout sessions, instant integration of polls, quizzes and interactive exercises to test knowledge of course content and gallery view and fixed seating with real time engagement data for instructors to better interact with students, regardless of class size.

“To achieve real change in online learning live sessions, we were looking for platforms specifically created to accomplish meaningful and dynamic class interactions,” said Norma Scagnoli, Assistant Dean for Education Innovation & Chief Learning Officer at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Engageli is not an off-the-shelf web conferencing solution. It is an authentic, purpose-built learning platform with considerable functionality designed to drive student success and better learning outcomes, while also facilitating the instructor experience in this challenging instructional setting.”

"Dan, Serge and Daphne have repeatedly built fast-growing, extremely successful companies. I am so fortunate to be working with them again." said Alex Balkanski. "Investing in a company linked to education is incredibly important to me on a personal level, and Engageli has the potential to enable a truly transformative learning experience.

Engageli is currently piloting its platform with a select group of higher-ed institutions. Please contact pilot@engageli.com to learn more about this exclusive, invite-only opportunity to shape the future of online education.

About Engageli

Engageli is a digital learning platform optimized for student success and that delivers engaging teaching and learning experience across a broad spectrum of needs for higher education. The company was founded in 2020 by Dan Avida, Serge Plotkin, Daphne Koller and Jamie Nacht Farrell. Engageli has raised over $14 million in funding.

https://www.engageli.com