OG edtech hip-hoppers ballin’ out with $1.5M Series A yaper round

Flocabulary tries to make learning fun. In 2016 we have all this technology, but teachers are still transmitting ideas to students by writing in chalk on blackboards. Flocabulary thinks another approach is through catchy, fun (and tame) hip-hop videos that tell stories of history, science and math. Earlier this month, it scored $1.5 million in funding.
“This company was started on an extremely simple idea, which was wouldn’t it be great if memorizing a vocab word was as easy as memorizing a rap song,” founder and CEO Alex Rappaport told Technical.ly Brooklyn in a previous interview. Founded in the Bay Area in 2004, the company moved to New York in 2005 and to Dumbo in 2008, where it’s remained, at 20 Jay St.

Now they’ll have some more runway to continue expansion. According to the company, its products are used as supplementary teaching material in more than 50,000 schools in the country.

“With the proliferation of classroom technology, as soon as we started putting music on the web and making music for it, the business really blew open,” Rappaport said.