Zen Educate, an online marketplace that algorithmically matches schools with the best teachers available, has raised £19.3m ($21m) in a Series A expansion funding round.
Founded in London in 2017, Zen Educate aims to supplant the traditional approach to teacher recruitment, a system that typically involves third-party agencies and high fees. On top of that, working with agencies often involves analog workflows, with paper timesheets and phone calls on the agenda.
“These agencies are incredibly expensive – the average UK education recruiter has a 30-35% markup,” Zen Educate co-founder and CEO Slava Kremerman told TechCrunch.
By cutting out these costly intermediaries, Zen Educate promises to reduce many of the costs and administrative friction of hiring substitute teachers, as well as full-time teachers and teaching assistants, through a free platform. -service that allows teachers and schools to manage their own profiles.
However, it’s not a complete game, as the company says it uses its own proprietary technology to conduct “thorough checks” on teachers during the registration process.
Zen Educate platform Image credits: Zen Educate
The main benefits of Zen Educate are that it serves as a natural filter that algorithmically surfaces the most suitable teachers based on a range of criteria.
“Rather than just seeing a universe of teachers and then randomly ‘guessing’ who to offer a role to, schools can see a curated list created by a matching algorithm that factors in availability, skills, proximity, type of role and background comments as well as many other factors,” Kremerman said.
Schools can also create “favorites” lists of the most suitable teachers, so they can group the best performing substitutes based on their previous experience and easily modify them when the situation calls for it.
Zen Educate platform Image credits: Zen Educate
show me the money
Kremerman said his firm had analyzed schools’ own funding data reported by the UK government and found that schools spent around £2bn ($2.2bn) a year on temporary staff, of which £600m was pounds ($662 million) can be attributed to agency fees. And it is these fees that Zen Educate wants to reduce, but not quite eliminate.
Indeed, Kremerman says his company charges a lower profit margin, around 15-18%, for every hour or day booked through his platform. And he claims to have already saved the UK education sector £10m ($11m) in ‘wasted recruitment agency fees’.
“There is a gap between what the teacher gets paid and what Zen Educate charges the school – the school saves money and the teacher earns more,” he said.
Zen Educate Co-Founders: Slava Kremerman (CEO) with Oren Cohen (Chief Accountant) Image credits: Zen Educate
So far, Zen Educate has largely served schools in the UK cities of London, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol and Leeds, although it actually launched in the US in March from Minneapolis, where Kremerman says it currently powers around 7,000 hours of teaching coverage per month. And with another big change in the bank, it is now well funded to expand further into the US market starting in Houston, Texas later this month.
While there have been a few tech-driven attempts to counter the existing agency-based order in the UK, nothing notable has gained traction. And in the United States, there are major players such as human capital management platform Frontline Education, which is currently in the process of changing ownership between two private equity firms in a 3.7 billions of dollars. Elsewhere, Swing Education does something somewhat similar to Zen Educate, but with a particular focus on substitute teachers only.
Regardless of the competition that exists, with approximately 1.2 million substitute teachers in the United States alone, there is more than enough room to accommodate several technology-infused marketplaces that bring teacher pairing and of schools in the 21st century.
“The best metaphor is to imagine if you were using Uber, and it just showed you a list of all the taxis in London – but didn’t tell you if they were still running, if they were available, where they were or what type of car it is,” Kremerman said. “That’s how substitute work is done now.
Zen Educate had previously raised around £9.4m ($10.4m) in funding across multiple rounds since inception, with the most recent being a £6.8m Series A round (7, $5m) split between 2019 and 2020. Now the company is adding a further £19.3m to the pot, bringing its total funding to £28.7m, with backers such as the education technology-focused venture capital Brighteye Ventures, Adjuvo, Ascension Ventures and a host of angel investors.
In addition to market expansion, Kremerman said the new cash injection will be used to double its workforce to 200 over the next six months, as well as acquire some incumbents in the market.
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