We had a tip about, have now confirmed, Intel's latest acquisition: Kno, the education startup that started life as a hardware business and later pivoted into software - specifically via apps that let students read interactive versions of digitized textbooks. Intel was among Kno's investors - the company had raised some $73.4 million in funding since being founded in 2009, with Intel leading the Series C round in April, 2011 (in the $37.5m round, Intel invested $20m).
“I can confirm Intel has purchased Kno,” a spokesperson told me just now. They are not disclosing deal terms but I'm hopefully going to speak to John Galvin, the GM of Intel Education, to get more details. (I'll update as I learn more.)
Update: Intel has now published a more detailed statement on its site. “The acquisition of Kno boosts Intel's global digital content library to more than 225,000 higher education and K-12 titles through existing partnerships with 75 educational publishers. Even more, the Kno platform provides administrators and teachers with the tools they need to easily assign, manage and monitor their digital learning content and assessments,” Galvin writes. “We're looking forward to combining our expertise with Kno's rich content so that together, we can help teachers create classroom environments and personalized learning experiences that lead to student success.”
We have still to find out who and what is coming over with the acquisition. Osman Rashid, the co-founder and CEO, was also a co-founder of Chegg.
Update 2: A bit more detail on how this is playing out. It turns out that just about everyone is joining Intel. The one major standout… CEO Rashid.
“He was definitely the figurehead behind it,” Galvin admitted to me in an interview, but ultimately the two did not see eye to eye about the direction of Kno under Intel. “That was something that Osman and I talked about early in the process,” he said. “But where I wanted to take Know and where Osman wanted to take it were two different things. His direction was to continue with a North American focus and I want to go international, and for us to go international, that's about integrating with Intel's sales teams, working on bringing this to new markets.”
It's unclear where Rashid is going next. We are trying to find out.
Using Kno for an international education play is not an out-of-left field idea. The two companies had already been working together in markets like China on textbook digitising initiatives. “It became more attractive to me to have them be a part of the portfolio rather than just a partner,” said Galvin to me. He pointed out the company's ingestion engine as a particularly interesting aspect of the business to help Intel work more closely with the publishing world.
There are also some aspects that play into Intel's bigger investments into areas like AI and natural language processing. “It's a very nice e-learning platform, and perhaps eventually also a natural language support platform, with an analytics engine. The capabilities are there. We can perhaps push them into areas they weren't ready to go in on their own.” He said that while there is still some IP left from the company's previous incarnation as a hardware play, for now the focus will be on more software development.
No comment from Galvin about the pricing on the acquisition.
The deal is the latest development in Intel's wider efforts to build out its education business. Among other things, recently Intel has put out reference designs for Android-based educational tablets, and it has gotten involved in e-education initiatives.
Kno itself has not yet issued a statement about the deal but its site posted a note a little while ago saying that it would go down for maintenance later today - possibly to post details of the acquisition (?).
We had heard that Kno was talking to interested parties some months ago, so in that sense, this is not a surprise.
The company has partnered with 75 publishers and has some 200,000 interactive titles, from kindergarden through to university-level textbooks, that can be accessed via its iPad, Android and Windows 7 and Windows 8 apps. “They are the same books, only smarter,” the company notes on its site. The main idea is that the books are not only digitised but include additional features to help students and teachers assess their progress, share information with others and generally get more engaged in the content.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/1c8Ue9zB0sQ/
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