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Brothers Brett and David Kopf have raised the venture capital for Remind101 in a funding round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
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Brett and David Kopf are two brothers who not only look alike, but also think alike.
They are the driving force behind Remind101, a free mobile messaging service aimed towards for the public education sector, which they developed to tackle what the Kopfs saw as one of the principal stumbling blocks in maintaining proper communications particularly in primary education.
The brothers saw a gap in the sector for the introduction of a user-friendly tool that would allow school teachers to increase levels of communication between them and their students as well as their parents and guardians.
The Kopf brothers got Remind101 under way with $1 million in seed capital in late 2011, raising $3.5 million in series A financing in September of last year, with their lead being particularly Social + Capital, Yuri Milner, Maneesh Arora as well as a handful of angel investors. Chamath Palihapitya, Social + Capital’s founder joined the board of Remind101 under the terms of their Series A investment
Now Remind101 have succeeded in conscripting a further $15 million in Series B funding, this time led by Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, while its previous investors Social + Capital and First Round Capital also took part. John Doerr, a senior partner in Kleiner will be also be joining the Kopf brothers on the board of directors.
The latest round of funding once again emphasises the importance that many people feel of being able to maintain constant and effective effective avenues of communication within both the primary and secondary learning systems, which is currently operated throughout schools in the United States only by the use of intercoms, PA systems, paper-based permission slips and, on limited occasions, through the telephone. These are systems which have been in operation for more than half a century, and have become increasingly ineffective.
To overcome this problem, in 2013, Remind101 released a mobile application compatible with both Android and iOS powered mobiles with intention of bridging the vastly winding communication gap was in the education system. The brothers succeeded in creating a mobile communication platform that rapidly enables teachers to send reminders to students and their parents either through text or email. Communication can cover a variety of subjects and has been for them to be capable of acting as an ideal and secure secure, private communications network.
Within a few months of launching Remind101 could point to the fact that they have more than six million users coming from the cross-section of teachers, students and parents, with the figure now having risen to just over ten million, with an average of 65 million messages being safely transmitted through the Remind101 platform each month.
For purposes of confidentiality Remind101 offers a wide choice of privacy features, such as the ability to mask telephone phone numbers, which means that the recipient is unable to reply unless they have their own access to the telephone number. Messages, which generally contain important updates on items such as changes in deadlines or assignment, can however be sent rapidly through either text or e-mail.
Remind101 can now count among its subscribers more than 600, 000 teachers, while impressive 15 percent of all those in the U.S, according to Brett, who at 25 is the younger of the two Kopf bothers, who hold the post of chief executive officer, while David, at 27, is the chief operations officer.
According to Brett Kopf the latest funding round shows the venture capital industry’s faith in San Francisco-based Remind101 and their ability to solve what is a real and sensitive problem. Currently Remind101 has around 15 people on the staff, which, according to Brett, will reach double that number by the end of 2014.
For the meantime Remind101 have not charged any money for the application, but hopes to be able to do so within the next 18 months or so, through charging school administrations or parents for extra features, which they will be including shortly in the application, including ability to provide authorized permission slips or easily handle payments from parents for pupils taking part in school activities.
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