Quintin Bingley

Ed-Tech Sector is Booming?

Anyone whos ever
sat in on a 500undergraduate lecture
knows that taking good
notes can get tricky,
says 23-year old Jack Tai.
What if you happen to
be sitting too far to hear
properly? Or, worse still,
what if youre an
international student?
That was the case for
Tais classmate Jackey Li,
whod just landed at the
University of Toronto
from China. But their
friend Kevin Wu, a native
Canadian, also had
trouble transcribing what
he heard in class. The
three bonded over those
struggles with spotty
annotations, they started
sharing notebooks and
spending afternoons
together at the library
going over material
covered in class.

Four years and three

Bachelors degrees
later, in September
2010, Tai, Wu and Li
launched
Notesolution, a website
that lets students share
notes online without
having to line up at the
photocopy machine.
They started marketing
the service at their alma
mater, and within the
first year we had 9,000
registered users, says
Tai. Today, the company
counts over 60,000 users
across Canada and 14
employees.
Notesolution is part of
Canadas so-called Edtech boom, with software
companies catering to
students, teachers and
professional trainers
sprouting up all over the
country. The last few
years have seen
education shoot to the

top of the charts in

terms of startup
activity. According
to a recent CIBC
study, the ranks of
self-employed Canadians
working in the sector
grew by a staggering 65
per cent between 2007
and 2012. By
comparison, the secondbest performing startup
industry in Canada.
Healthcare, saw growth
of less than 25 per cent
during the same period.
Canadas Ed-tech
champion is arguably
Desire2Learn, a provider
of software solutions for
educational applications
that has boldlyand
successfullytaken on
U.S. giant Blackboard.
The Kitchener, Ont.based startup secured
$80 million in funding in
its latest round of
financing earlier this
year, a significant

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venture capital
investment even by U.S.
standards and the
largest such investment
on record in a Canadian
education-related
business.
The Canadian trend
mirrors whats
happening south of the
border. In California, Edtech is the latest hot
thing. Startup forums are
abuzz with chatter about
how education software
will save the world, from
revolutionizing academia
to bringing free
knowledge to the lowincome students and the
developing world, as
purported by Coursera,
which offers online
courses on anything
from Contemporary
American Poetry to
Computational Finance
at no cost. Investment in
education-related

Quintin Bingley

software companies has

nearly tripled between
2002 and 2011, rising to
$429 million from $146
million, according to the
National Venture Capital
Association.
Perhaps
unsurprisingly, those
numbers are much
smaller in Canada, where
similar deals by local
venture capital funds
accounted for only $116
million between 2008
and 2012, according to
Thomson Reuters data.
Between 2007 and the
first half of this year, Edtech companies made up
only 3.6 per cent of

software investment,
and a meager 0.6 per
cent of overall
investment.

established revenue
flows.

The sector, it seems,

hasnt escaped the
familiar constraints so
many Canadian
entrepreneurs come up
against: Relatively
scarce capital and riskaverse investors.
Whenever pitching to a
Canadian venture capital
fund, says Notesolutions
Tai, the first question
that comes up is: Are
you profitable yet? In
the U.S., he says, its
about Selling a vision,
rather than having

Luckily, Notesolution
and several others are
getting some loving from
Silicon Valley. In June, Tai
and Wu were in San
Francisco schmoozing
with U.S. investors and
faculty from Stanford
and the University of
California, Berkley. They
attended the Launch
Education Conference,
an event hosted by
Microsoft where
promising startups in the
field got a chance to
mingle with a whos who
of Californias tech
industry.

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The company is
receiving great interest
from universities in the
U.K. Recent cuts to
higher education funding
there are making college
applicants more
selective and
heightening competition
among schools trying to
attract applicants,
according to
GrowthWorks Atlantic
CEO Tom Hayes. Weve
been very pleased, he
says, were pretty
bullish about where that
might take us