Investment

Online learning platform Grasp has raised £3.1m ($4m) in seed funding led by Balderton Capital.

The funding will be used to further develop Grasp’s platform and expand the team, with key hires in product data science and engineering.

Founded by early Revolut employees Ed Matthews and Jacob Sidorov last year, Grasp wants to increase the rate at which humans learn.

A decade from now, Grasp’s mission is to be the centre of learning, able to take anyone from novice to master in a field, ASAP.

Ed Matthews, founder and CEO of Grasp, said: “The user experience as an adult learner sucks! Whether we’re learning to solve specific problems at work or trying to modernise our skill sets, learning is inconvenient, impersonal, and high friction. Team Grasp are the A-players fixing that.”

Daniel Waterhouse, partner at Balderton Capital, said: “We are excited to be working with Ed again on his highly ambitious plan to transform self-learning in a world where skill set requirements are constantly changing and people are hungry to learn and adapt.”

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As technology continues to accelerate and content creation gets easier and easier, the glut of online learning materials, already hard to manage, will become a maze impenetrable with existing tools.

While the likes of ChatGPT and TikTok can provide answers to quick queries, it is becoming increasingly challenging to find and access rigorous educational experiences.

For individuals looking to comprehensively learn something, finding a structured course of high quality resources, personally appropriate, is painfully difficult.

Grasp’s educational platform will help people accelerate their learning, deepen their knowledge, and expand skill sets. Starting with modern vocational skills like programming, there is already a waiting
list for interested parties to sign up for beta testing.

Grasp is hiring for several roles including a product design lead, software engineers, and data scientists.

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