Quizziz raises $31.5M to motivate students with gamified lessons

Quizizz has raised $31.5 million to motivate every student it can with a combination of gamified quizzes and interactive lessons.

The Santa Monica, California, and India-based company has grown into one of the largest learning platforms in the world by making it easy for teachers to motivate their students with gamified quizzes and interactive lessons. The platform runs off a global teacher community that has contributed more than 20 million quizzes and lessons spanning every subject and grade level.

Tiger Global Management led the round, with existing investors Nexus Venture Partners, GSV Ventures, and Eight Roads Ventures also joining as investors again. New backers include Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang. The raise follows a prior funding announcement in March 2021.

Quizizz is seeing use in over 120 countries and more than 80% of U.S. K-12 schools.

Rory Roberts, a math teacher at Brigantine Community School, said in a statement that Quizizz helped make the transition to online teaching easier in the pandemic. Now he is using it almost exclusively now that school is back in a physical place.

Above: More than 20 million Quizizz quizzes and lessons have been created.

Image Credit: Quizizz

“Making, finding, and altering lessons using Quizizz has become almost a hobby for me,” Roberts said.

Quizizz has its roots in a remedial math program in Bangalore, India, where cofounders Ankit Gupta and Deepak Cheenath served as volunteers. Rather than focus on supplemental curriculum like many EdTech startups, they set out to empower teachers to create more engaging learning experiences for their students in the classroom and at home. The platform has grown exclusively via word-of-mouth as educators share Quizizz with colleagues online and in-person.

Gupta said in a statement that in the average week students around the world answer more than 300 million questions on Quizizz. He said Quizizz’s hope is that every time a question is answered, it inspires the student to keep learning and gives their teacher time to focus on personalized support instead of staying up late grading a stack of worksheets.

Quizizz will continue to expand its team across both India and the U.S. to keep pace with customer growth and invest in key partnerships to accelerate expansion in international markets.

Above: Quizizz has raised $47 million to date.

Image Credit: Quizizz

Deepak Cheenath, a cofounder of Quizizz, said in a statement that the company did user-testing with teachers in California and saw a video of students cheering on their classmates in an auditorium in Kenya. He said Quizizz got a thank you note from a group of teachers wearing Quizizz branded T-shirts in Indonesia.

The company has raised $47 million in funding and it has 42 employees. In an email to GamesBeat, Gupta said the company is profitable and it just launched its first paid subscriptions (built on top of the free offering) for individual consumers and organizations in late 2020.

Gupta said the student engagement platform helps teachers and students quickly create gamified quizzes and interactive lessons.

“From a student’s perspective, they’re ‘playing’ homework and in-class activities along with their peers,” he said. “We combine game design elements like points, power-ups, and leaderboards with learning science features like adaptive question banks and ‘redemption questions’ (getting a second shot at a question you got wrong) in order to inspire students to continue learning for mastery.”