- Romanian Adservio, an EdTech startup that offers a management platform that parents, students, and teachers can access, has raised €2M in an equity funding round led by Catalyst Romania Fund II, a local VC fund.
- This news follows a decade of growth in the local market and after supporting over 1000 schools to digitize their processes.
- This investment will be used to keep developing their solution in Romania, bring in new clients and partners, and scale it internationally.
Adservio is working on facilitating access to absences, grades, test scores, and other educational information. Their goal is to help students develop their skills and engage them in face-to-face, hybrid, or online scenarios, but also to bring technology closer to their target audience.
With the new capital, the company plans to help digitize schools, and work with their users to improve their solutions.
„With broadband access and with a higher technology penetration in the educational system, the majority of students are now very comfortable with online learning platforms. As a result, we believe that, in the future, any technology that can be combined with in-person education will become more appealing to students, because it will enable them to assimilate knowledge more effectively,” Alin Stanciu, Partner at Catalyst Romania, shared in the press release.
Can EdTech lower dropout rates?
Adservio was founded in Iasi, Romania, in 2008 by Alexandru Holicov, who is also the CEO in charge of a team of 40 members and growing. He has a background in technology and business management and was inspired to develop this solution by his mother, a teacher that has struggled with the classic educational system.
“We started with a simple solution that involved on-site computers, lots of cables and other dated stuff compared with nowadays standards. We convinced a local high school to adopt our platform and that was our pilot project. Now we employ some of the latest technologies and we are committed to continuing on this path,” Alexandru reminiscences.
The online school management platform targets high schools, schools, and kindergartens to connect teachers with parents and children in an accessible way. Their solution has been approved by the Ministry of Education and this allowed the development of a 2021 pilot project through which educational institutions can use the digital grade book officially.
The platform is available in nine languages and over 750K monthly users have accessed both the web and the mobile versions. The team offers security measures and data protection for any type of breach. They want to lower school dropout and absenteeism rates.
What is next for EdTech?
Adservio’s founder shares with us that the new generation of kids wants to learn and interact in a digital environment and they are ready to provide the tools for the school of tomorrow. For Alexandru, education is the core of personal fulfillment and progress. He firmly believes that educated people are happier, healthier, and peace-loving.
“EdTech technologies have gained momentum during the Covid-19 pandemic, and it was the same for us. For 2022, we aim to increase our team, attracting passionate people, for whom education is an important value. Together we will further improve the user experience and create new solutions for schools to better prepare their students for the future”, Alexandru Holicov says.
The European EdTech vertical is expected to triple in growth from 2019 to 2027, from a market of almost €20M to over €60M. Elsewhere in Romania, other edtech solutions such as those offered by Kinderpedia, Izibac, and Ascendia are riding the wave of booming digitalization, showing how technology can become a partner for educational institutions.
