Teamie brings social networking to education

The platform already works with K-12, higher education, and enterprises.

Teamie is the first social learning platform in Singapore that creates a private learning network for the school, college or enterprise to engage users at a level similar to Facebook and LinkedIn, by bringing the power of social networking to education.

Teamie’s objective is to make learning collaborative and drive engagement through peer-to-peer or student-to-teacher discussions about the learning topics to improve learning outcomes and performance. It provides mobile access through the Android and iOS apps for anytime, anywhere access and in a way extend the physical boundary of the classroom. Its virtual progress analytics enables educators, students, parents, employers and employees to stay updated with progress on individual and group activity and performance.

CEO and co-founder Shivanu Shukla believes that learning is better when there is an opportunity to discuss, ask questions, share ideas about the learning topic instead of just consuming a video or a document alone. “The discussion around the learning content helps improve the understanding of the individual as well as the group as whole.”

Shukla manages the business affairs of Teamie, and is responsible for the product strategy and development, go-to-market strategy and sales. He works with educational institutes as well as enterprises, and helps them move their learning-teaching experience to an online and collaborative learning platform that leverages on the power of social, mobile and cloud.

Ashwin Kumar Singh, Teamie’s co-founder, added that “With social platforms becoming the de-facto mode of communication and collaboration, and mobile proliferation and cloud computing on the rise, we seized the opportunity to disrupt the learning platform space to make learning engaging, as well as bring a 21st century learning experience to the classroom and beyond.” Singh is an expert in cloud computing with experience in consultative sales and regulatory compliance. He has worked with government clients in Asia Pacific to help them effectively migrate their offline learning programs online.

Teamie addresses the challenge of engaging students in learning in an information-rich social media-driven hyper-connected mobile-centric world. eLearning has been around for many years, but the lack of engagement has reduced its effectiveness. MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are transforming the way education is being delivered and pushing institutions to provide a more flexible learning approach. Teamie helps institutions and organizations in making learning more engaging & fun, accessible anytime anywhere; make learners part of a community, and help teachers with analytics to drive better performance.

The opportunity was clear and it was massive, and even before incorporating the company, Shukla and Singh invested their time and money, and started to build a product prototype. The idea was pitched to friends and angel investors, and the company was incorporated in March 2011 as an angel investor decided to back the idea, and invest in the potential of a social collaborative learning platform.

Just recently, Teamie raised its pre-series A round led by ACP and SPRING Seeds, together with Phystech Ventures, and their initial angel investor.

Since its founding in 2011, Teamie has raised around S$2.5M , including the seed investment and the recent pre-series A round led by ACP and SPRING Seeds, along with Phystech ventures and the angel investor.

The funding will be used to expand sales & support team in order to reach out and connect with customers, and upgrade marketing and R&D efforts, among others.

With customer contracts now in eight countries, and users in over 12 countries, Teamie has gained good traction within the Asia-Pacific region, making in-roads into large markets such as China as well. “We are now working with customers across three segments: K-12, Higher Education and Enterprises,” Shukla added.