Irish exam preparation start-up SimpleStudy is expanding to the UK and has begun a fundraising round to help fuel further growth.
The company, which was founded by Oisín Devoy, Phillip McKenna and Zac Dair, is an e-learning platform aimed at second-level students in Ireland and the UK. The platform offers practice exam questions, revision topics and other preparation materials for pupils. Initially starting with Junior and Leaving Certificate, the NDRC company is now targeting students in Scotland, concentrating on the core subjects.
“We focused on 10 subjects in Scotland that are taken by the most students,” said Mr Devoy. “About 20 per cent of the subjects taken by 80 per cent of the students so we focused on those to begin with.”
Mr Devoy said the expansion came following the appointment of Lara Horgan, who is in charge of new markets for the platform. Ms Horgan dealt with the content for the local market, while Mr Dair, who is chief technology officer for SimpleStudy, built the infrastructure to support it, such as automatically uploading questions for a Scottish market instead of having to input them manually.
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The system could also be used to launch in other geographical areas.
“We had the vision of building a modular product that would work in new markets, so it’s not having to re-engineer everything from the ground up because we made some of the right decisions early on that this could be a platform that would scale in different markets,” said Mr McKenna.
SimpleStudy is already eyeing other markets, including France, which it is planning to tackle in the first quarter of next year, with other English-speaking markets also on its radar.
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To support this, the company is currently raising a pre-seed funding round, with a target of between €500,000-€750,000. The co-founders are already talking to Irish and international investors, and having a number of paying customers already signed up is also boosting its financial war chest.
Mr McKenna said the company was focused on hitting a target of €1 million to €2 million annual recurring revenue within 12-18 months of its first serious institutional capital.
