Fixing the broken online tutoring market | Why we invested in cleverly

As investors we thrive to invest in technologies that shape the future. Only few topics shape the future more than education.

Nevertheless, education and the lacking quality of it seems to be one of the constant discussion points in society. Especially during the pandemic, when students were confined to their homes, society became painfully aware of the lack of digitization in our education system. Another hurtful realization for many (parents) was how challenging giving classes even to young children is.

Now that students can finally return to their classrooms, numerous discussions have been held, and (too) few changes have been made to our education system. What did change though is that many of the returning children have immense knowledge gaps and many parents have understood the complexity of teaching and are desperately looking for help. Furthermore, the Corona pandemic has led to a rapid surge in the adoption of online learning methods, spurred by the forced shift to remote schooling leveraging benefits such as improved focus, convenience, and cost-effectiveness.

This is where our new investment cleverly comes into play. Björn and Fredrik, two of the cleverly founders, were impacted by this frustrating situation such as millions of fellow parents. Learning stress became a frequent companion in their family lives. After testing all the online tutoring services out there and being left underwhelmed by the quality, the two successful serial entrepreneurs felt the urge to do something about this and founded cleverly in 2021 with Philipp and Mike.

To disrupt traditional (online) tutoring and help students and parents to decrease learning stress, cleverly offers its students help from three key sources. First, from their cleverly mentor, all trained pedagogues, who answers all questions around learning and acts as moderator and go-to person between the student and the parents. Second, the student gets matched to its tutor based on the pre-selection from the mentor. Cleverly has a pool of tutors covering the whole range of subjects that are taught in primary and secondary educational stages who are vetted and evaluated on a continuous basis. Premium quality is at the core of the offering. Third, the student has access to a central dashboard where all information about the respective goals, milestones, and achievements are collected and tracked in a privacy-compliant manner.

The idea of individualized high-quality tutoring was quickly supported by renowned business angels and industry experts such as Verena Pausder or Michael Shangkuan, the CEO of Lingoda, who invested alongside other renowned angels in cleverly’s Pre-Seed investment round in early 2021. We are more than happy to be joining cleverly’s group of investors as the Lead of their Seed Financing Round only five months after their Pre-Seed round.

Supporting children in closing knowledge gaps in traditional subjects is only the beginning though. With an increasing base of tutors and mentors, cleverly thrive to give every child on the platform individualized access to knowledge beyond maths, languages and history and hereby tailor the ideal learning journey for everyone.

We are thrilled to be part of this mission of transforming a market long due for disruption with a triple-A team.