Knewton

Knewton is an online learning company that offers preparation courses for standardized tests, such as the GMAT, LSAT, and SAT. The company was founded in 2008 by Jose Ferreira, a former executive at Kaplan, Inc. Based in New York City, it has raised $2.5 million in investment capital from Accel Partners, Reid Hoffman, Ron Conway, and Josh Kopelman at First Round Capital. The company was selected to the 2009 AlwaysOn Global 250 List, representing the best of emerging innovators and disrupters from all technology sectors -- and was named Category Winner in the Digital Education field. Additionally, Knewton was a finalist in the 2008 Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge. In April 2009 Knewton closed a $6 million round of funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners with returning investors. In April 2010 Knewton closed a $12.5 million round of funding led by FirstMark Capital with returning investors. Knewton's offices are located at 19 Union Square West in Manhattan, New York City.

Knewton uses adaptive learning technology to identify each student's particular strengths and weaknesses. Concepts are tagged at very specific levels, testing students' grasp of hundreds of skills measured by standardized tests. The company first launched with a GMAT preparation course. Len Swanson and Rob McKinley who developed the original GMAT CATs for Educational Testing Service (ETS) and ACT, collaborated to write the scoring algorithms. In 1995, researchers now working for Knewton proved that the small question pool available to the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) computer-adaptive test made it vulnerable to cheating. Knewton plans to apply its online adaptive learning to a wide range of education markets.