Labster, the Denmark headquartered startup constructing digital laboratory simulations for STEM college students, has raised $21 million in Series B funding.
Leading the spherical is Owl Ventures, with participation from Balderton Capital, Northzone and Swisscom Ventures. Previous backers Nordic Makers, David Helgason, EduCapital and Entangled Group additionally adopted on, bringing the whole raised by the corporate so far to $35 million.
Launched again in 2013, Labster offers interactive laboratory simulations powered by VR for college students that want to discover lab experiments in biology, chemistry, physics, engineering and basic sciences. It provides 70 digital labs with the goal of accelerating participation in STEM curricula, whereas additionally enhancing studying outcomes and retention charges.
“STEM-related careers are increasingly becoming both more in demand and also more important than ever before,” says Labster co-founder Michael Bodekaer. “However, most students will never have access to expensive, high-tech labs, or have enough time in the lab to learn critical skills they’ll need”
Specifically, Labster’s totally interactive digital lab simulations are designed to have interaction and stimulate a scholar’s pure curiosity as they study. The thought is to offer an setting the place can experiment with and discover totally different lab situations — and at much less value than brick ‘n’ mortar labs.
“We aim to provide modern science learning that is cost and time-effective,” says Bodekaer.
More than 150 universities and excessive colleges world wide used Labster’s digital labs in 2018, a quadrupling of annual progress that put the software program within the arms of greater than 200,000 college students worldwide. Those academic establishments embody Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Exeter University and ETH Zurich. Labster has additionally developed partnerships with trade leaders in know-how and schooling, comparable to Google and Arizona State University, Lenovo, Pearson and Springer.
Meanwhile, this newest spherical might be used to speed up the enlargement of Labster’s STEM content material catalog and growth of latest lab simulations. The funding will even allow the corporate to proceed to scale its U.S. operations, together with buyer help and gross sales.
“Our main competitor is the status quo i.e. institutions hesitant to adopt new technology even though it’s been proven that virtual labs increase student engagement and achievement,” provides Bodekaer. “There can be several reasons why they are hesitant but the most common one we see is educators not feeling like they have the time or knowledge to implement virtual labs into their teaching. That’s why we are continuously working on our training and on-boarding to help educators get started with virtual labs. Our goal is for educators to feel like we are holding their hand every step of the way and fortunately the feedback we are getting indicates that we are doing a pretty good job of that”.
To that finish, Labster is offered as a subscription service to universities and excessive colleges. The edtech firm provides two subscription worth fashions: establishment accounts and particular person scholar accounts.
