When a group of Babson College students got together to create Arist, a platform for text message-based courses, their goal was simple: to make learning more accessible, effective and affordable.
Now, with nearly 3 million American students lacking access to an internet connection at home, Arist co-founders Ryan Laverty, Michael Ioffe and Maxine Anderson believe their SMS-based platform is a strong contender for the future of education.
“When Covid-19 hit, we very quickly realized that in the United States, so many workers, so many employees and so many students lack access to the Internet, and that was going to pose a huge problem to educating people rapidly, especially about Covid itself,” Ioffe said.
Arist saw an early spike in usage both from educators and from corporate clients, according to Ioffe. The team moved quickly and, this spring, decided to make its platform free for educational enterprise customers through September. Arist also launched a free course specifically designed to educate people about Covid-19: the symptoms, the risk factors and how best to avoid contracting it.
That spike precipitated an investment round that Arist closed just a few weeks ago. The startup brought in $1.9 million in seed funding led by Acadian Ventures, Global Founders Capital and Craft Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator—which Arist graduated from earlier this year—Soma Capital, Emles Venture Partners, Hack VC, Rebel Fund and Liquid 2 Ventures. Arist also secured checks from angel investors Derek Schoettle, CEO of Cloudant, and Adam Goldstein, founder of Hipmunk.
Arist will use the funding to hire two team members, taking its headcount to six. Ioffe said the startup hopes to expand to eight full-time staff within the next year. The money will also help Arist improve its platform.
“We’re the pioneers of text-message learning. We invented the medium,” Ioffe said. “For us, a meaningful portion of the funding will go toward scaling up our technology, ensuring that organizations can create courses faster and learners can take courses quicker, but also educating enterprise learning leaders about what text-message courses are and how we can really make an impact in enterprise.”
Arist was founded last year and scaled during Babson’s Summer Venture Program. Ioffe said that Babson has been beyond supportive: In fact, it is one of Arist’s 50-plus clients in the educational and nonprofit space. Much of Babson’s summer study program this year was conducted via the Arist platform.
Laverty graduated from Babson this spring, while Ioffe and Anderson, who would be a junior and a sophomore, respectively, both decided to take a leave of absence this fall to focus solely on Arist.
“It’s a huge leap, but I think for us, we firmly believe what we’re doing is really critical in terms of making education more successful, and at a time when people need better training more than ever,” Ioffe said. “We’re compelled by our vision and the need for what we’re doing.”
