BenchPrep, an educational software developer specializing in interactive courses for school, college and professional certification, inked new deals with publishers that will add more than 100 courses to its digital platform. The Chicago company also announced that it received $6 million in new venture capital investment last month.
BenchPrep course content is designed to be a broad course platform rather than book titles and the company adds a variety of digital functionality to each. BenchPrep courses are available for iPad, iPhone, Android devices and online and the digital courses also offer access to online community access and provide assessment and performance reporting and other functionality.
In a phone interview with BenchPrep co-founder Ashish Rangnekar, he said the new partnerships include Pearson, O’Reilly Media, Allen Resources, Microsoft Press and others. Rangnekar said BenchPrep offers about 120 courses at present and has about “80 courses in production. We’ll have 200 available on the site by the end of September. The new partnerships will add 100 courses that will be available probably around November.”
Rangnekar also said BenchPrep received $6 million in venture capital investment last month from New Entgerprise Associates with participation from Revolution Ventures. He said the new funds would be used to develop new course material
Additional partnerships are still to come,” Rangnekar said, “as publishers are beginning to view us as their direct-to-consumer-distribution channel. Students, on the other hand, are loving the power and convenience of aggregating all courses on a single platform, with engaging interface and personalized learning with robust analytics across study subjects and devices.”
