23 EdTech Startups Joining Y Combinator’s Summer Cohort 2021

By: Gabriela Zedán

Founded in 2005, Y Combinator is without a doubt the world’s best accelerator. They have invested in nearly 3,000 companies in various industries with notable alumni including; AirBnB, Doordash, Dropbox, and Stripe.

As the edtech sector continues to boom, it is no surprise that there is an increasing focus in the space from giants like YC, as we can see from the 23 industry companies joining their 2021 summer cohort.

Their interest in edtech maps what is happening across the globe where digital learning companies have already raised over $10 billion across 568 deals, according to market research firm HolonIQ. When looking at the 23 companies in the cohort, there are 7 countries represented in total, these being the US, India, UK, Argentina, Malaysia, Singapore, and Somalia with the US and India dominating representation.

Notably, even though Singapore is a small country, two Singapore-based companies were selected, confirming SuperCharger’s interest in the space with alumni like Akadasia, Noodle Factory, and NewCampus.

At SuperCharger Ventures we wanted to understand what the future of education holds by analyzing their incoming companies.

Meet the 23 edtech startups selected:

• Algo University — 🇮🇳. An online academy on a mission to transform the tech career of early-stage engineers, by getting you your first internship and job.
• APPX — 🇮🇳. A startup that empowers creators with mobile apps! The selected features offered are; mock tests, courses, live sessions, blogs, e-books, and the opportunity to build a community.
• Bold Voice — 🇺🇸. Speech and accent coaching app that helps non-native English speakers be as well-understood and confident in English as in their native language. Personalized, bite-sized lessons from Hollywood’s top accent coaches coupled with AI feedback on pronunciation create an effective and fun learning experience at a fraction of the price of coaching.
• Careerist — 🇺🇸. A learning platform that trains job seekers for careers in tech and automates their job applications. They provide live classes and adaptive learning software that facilitate self-paced training.
• Filadd — 🇦🇷. Filadd is a mobile platform to support aspiring university students. They offer online courses to support career courses in different universities across Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Brazil.
• First Ignite — 🇺🇸. FirstIgnite helps researchers at universities connect with companies that are interested in their research. Researchers enter descriptions of their studies and receive the companies and email addresses of those most likely to partner.
• Genei — 🇬🇧. Research platform that automatically summarises background reading, produces blogs, articles, and reports more efficiently.
• Iona Mind — 🇺🇸. Iona is a mental health support tool that fits in your pocket. It reaches out proactively and is available 24/7 to offer support, personalized plans, and guidance.
• KaiPod Learning — 🇺🇸. KaiPod Learning works with 4th through 12th graders who go to school online. They provide a physical place for these students to work on their classes, interact with other students, and get support from teachers.
• Kalam Labs — 🇮🇳. A Live Game Streaming Platform for Science. Kalam Labs is on a mission to nurture kid’s curiosity and love for science. So they have built a platform where they can learn the coolest science topics by watching Live Game Streams and playing Science Games.
• Kurios —🇺🇸. Kurios prepares professionals and enterprises in Latin America for the digital age with entertainment programs co-created by experts from some of the world’s most innovative companies like Amazon, Dropbox, Uber, Mercado Liber, Rappi, and more.
• Litnerd —🇺🇸. Litnerd brings books to life! They turn classroom reading into an immersive and entertaining experience.
• Metaphor —🇸🇴. A company that created Wanderer 2, a large language model that was trained to search through 2.5 million articles that were posted on Hacker News. It was trained to predict webpages in a context where someone is describing them. For example, somewhere in our training data, someone might have written
• Mindfi — 🇸🇬. MindFi’s Mission: To empower people to achieve peak mental performance. They are creating a community that helps people prioritize mental well-being. Their goal is for people to value their minds first instead of their bodies. To achieve this, they have built an all-in-one employee well-being app that delivers personalized self-care recommendations, 24/7 guided support, and behavioral coaches.
• Oneistox — 🇮🇳. Oneistox offers online cohort-based courses for designers, architects, and engineers from around the world. Learners are upskilling in subjects like Product design, Building Information design, Sustainable design, Computational design, Construction management to name a few.
• Pandai — 🇲🇾. Pandai was launched in 2020, and now has more than 200,000 registered students. They are on a mission to transform the learning space with technology, to cater to 21st-century learners.
• Pillar — 🇺🇸. Pillar provides the infrastructure and provider network to integrate health coaching as the future of affordable patient care.
• Quest — 🇺🇸. Quest is an app where you can listen to soundbites with career advice. It’s where battle-tested experts answer professional questions in short audio clips. They are a community that shares intimate and personal stories about work you’ve never heard before.
• Safer Management —🇺🇸. Safer Management is a software company that accurately tracks student attendance data with the power of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.
• Spark Studio — 🇮🇳. Spark Studio offers high-quality online courses for extra-curricular learning for 6–15 yr olds. Designed by experts, and taught by superlative teachers, their classes are in small groups for individual attention and making learning fun and interactive.
• Strive Math —🇸🇬. Strive teaches K12 math through code via live 1–1 online classes. In Strive classes, students code games and visualizations that are aligned to their school math syllabus. In the process, kids learn the most valuable skill in the 21st century: coding.
• Synth —🇺🇸 Synth helps you capture, summarize & retrieve knowledge from any platform. It allows you to be on top of the knowledge you consume in audio through AI-summary & capturing information in 1-click from real-time transcript.
• Tappity — 🇺🇸. They believe that a deeper understanding of science leads to a more prosperous world. Tappity helps children develop the tools and enthusiasm they’ll need not only to succeed but also to make a real impact on humanity as a whole.

Sources:

U.S Edtech Roars With Over $3.2 Billion Invested in First Half of 2021

Here are all the companies from Y Combinator's Summer 2021 Demo Day, Part 1

Here are all the companies from Day 2 of Y Combinator's Summer 2021 Demo Day