Telegraph Media Group, the publisher of The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph newspapers, has acquired Gojimo, an app that enables UK high school students to prepare for exams. Although the exact terms of the deal are yet to be disclosed, it has been stated that the Gojimo team will be staying on, with the company continuing to be run as a separate entity.
The Gojimo app, available on iOS, Android, and the web, assists students in brushing up on various subjects, enabling them to become ready to appear for their national exams through its thousands of curriculum-specific assessment items. Claiming the position of the U.K.’s number one exam preparation app, it features over 65,000 revision questions for over 20 different subjects. The startup has also dabbled in premium content from major educational publishers, such as McGraw-Hill Education and Oxford University Press, available via in-app purchases.
Gojimo boasted of shareholders including London VC firm Index Ventures, and JamJar Investments, the venture fund set up by the founders of Innocent Drinks, both of whom participated in Gojimo’s seed round. The company was also backed by Robin and Saul Klein (the father and son duo), Deborah Quazzo of GSV Advisors, seed-stage investment platform Firestartr, and the London Mayor’s London Co-Investment Fund in a later round. Equity crowd-funding platform CrowdBnk also sourced additional finances, with Gojimo presumably having raised a total of around $3 million.
CEO George Burgess founded the startup after dropping out of Stanford, and gave the following statement regarding Gojimo in December 2015:
We don’t have any serious competitors in the UK. There is a lot of noise but few products of any quality. Some of the bigger publishers have tried their hand at mobile revision resources, but they’ve never understood apps. They don’t know how to market their products or understand freemium models.
It is worth noting that the Telegraph Media Group, a leading news publisher, has acquired the company, in light of the aforementioned statement. The tables have turned internally, with Christopher Keller, Head of Group Business Development at TMG, issuing the statement:
For more than 160 years, The Telegraph has empowered its readers through its rich and trusted content. This acquisition is another milestone in our strategy to engage new audiences and to empower more people to progress in life through the content we produce.
This latest acquisition by an old-school establishment represents a growing trend of similar institutions across the globe, vying to stay relevant and in touch with what is current, in a dynamic atmosphere characterized by increasing competence of technology in everyday life.
