I am a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin and the founder and CEO of ClioVis, Inc. a small educational technology start up and pedagogical technology that is designed to help students master course content in history classes and beyond. I've taught over 8,000 students in the past 20 years and designed ClioVis to fit the needs of our current students.
Problem
Today's undergraduate students are failing lower division survey classes at increasingly high rates (up to 41%). This trend is expected to continue as students entering universities today are at least a grade level behind previous generations. (https://nces.ed.gov/whatsnew/press_releases/2_09_2023.asp). Thus, today's entering freshman need additional help mastering critical skills.
ClioVis is an interactive timeline and network mapping application designed as an immersive, collaborative, and hands-on digital learning platform. ClioVis helps leverage their "digital content creation muscle" while pushing them build up their reasoning, critical thinking, and evidenced based learning muscles. Clio is the Greek muse of safeguarding knowledge, vis = to visualize. ClioVis enables students to visualize the events or concepts discussed in a course and gain a deeper understanding of the relationships between them.
As students make connections they learn the craft of the discipline in which they are working. In history classes, for instance, they focus not just on when something happened, but also learn why it happened and learn about historical context and interpretation along the way. Thus, using the software almost surreptitiously also teaches critical thinking and analysis as it helps students understand the difference between causal v. correlative relationships in a visual way. Moreover, students are asked to cite their sources and justify the connections they made. This pushes them to engage in evidence based learning and higher level thinking and scaffolds the learning experience. Created for my own students at the university, the platform now serves students beyond the UT-Austin.
Dr. Erika Bsumek (Founder & CEO): UT Austin Regents Distinguished Teaching Professor, President’s Teaching Award recipient, and two decades of higher-ed experience. She pioneered the ClioVis concept to address high failure rates in general education courses. She understands the academic market and its nuances.
Braeden Kennedy & Ian Diaz (Lead Developers): Met at UT’s Simulation and Game Applications Lab; collectively bring 12+ years in edtech software development. They are the technical foundation of the company and are also implementing a refresh of the platform with a recent $100K investment into the platform.
Steve Ledbetter (President & COO): Over 20 years in education technology, led two previous companies to over $50M and $100M valuations, respectively. Steve has been able to grow education technology companies and therefore is well positioned to make ClioVis financially profitable and scale it, Marcus Golding (academic advisor): PhD student with 10+ years of experience in higher education.
Our go to market strategy is similar to the textbook model: instructor assigns, students pays. In other cases, libraries or departments pay for the platform and provide it to their students. Our initial go-to-market strategy has targeted higher education, focusing on professors of core curriculum courses and their Gen Z students. We originally piloted ClioVis at UT-Austin and have since expanded to other universities nationwide. For instance, we have individual faculty members assigning the software at over 30 different universities. But, we also have three pilot enterprise deals at Colorado State (department wide deal), West Point (department wide deal), and the University of Houston (college wide, via the library). We are actively working on growing our current deals and adding additional enterprise level deals.
First goal is to market ClioVis to the 8 states that require 3-6 hours of history classes in order for students to graduate. From there, we plan to expand to all 19M college students in the U.S. We anticipate building the following future partnerships by :
- Working with publishers to embed ClioVis timelines into textbooks and supplemental materials;
- Expanding our educator networks by working with teacher training organizations;
- Partnering with content creators in the entertainment space (Youtube, TikTok)
- Working with Unizin, to provide ClioVis to the 14 R-1 universities in their portfolio. We continue to work on additional partnerships. Our larger vision to become the go to platform for visualizing and mastering course content across multiple disciplines, including STEM disciplines..
We are currently generating about $6000 in monthly recurring revenue. This comes from 1) current subscribers who pay $4.99 per month (with an educational discount) via our website; 2) via instructors assigning and students paying $13.00-$16.00 per semester (depending on the school/deal that has been negotiated), and from "enterprise" or departmental levels deals.
Our ask to investors is $500K to $1M dollar investment. This will be used in the following way:
- Product and infrastructure enhancements: Software enhancements for our new AI plan, expand the platform to be more STEM friendly and make it more easily available to other disciplines guided by beta testing.
- Sales and marketing operations: hiring a sales and marketing professional (or team), expand disciplinary outreach. We need to determine the needs of users beyond history and humanities to expand the reach of the platform.
- Customer success and retention, our goal is to make the user experience better to retain our student users. Retaining the instructors and departments who use ClioVis is key. Our recent West Point enterprise deal is an example, we started off with 1 instructor using the platform in one class. Now, the history department at West Point is using the platform in their lower division survey classes. Our goal is to expand this use to classes beyond the history department at West Point next year.
- More efficacy testing. We currently have efficacy data from the University of Texas that shows that creating one ClioVis timeline helps students master much as writing 1 semester long research paper. (see "Proven Efficacy Slide" on pitch deck). A note on the video: The video is slightly out of date and reflects outdated student user numbers (9K, we have since had 30K students on the platform).
We are currently generating about $6000 in monthly recurring revenue. This comes from 1) current subscribers who pay $4.99 per month (with an educational discount) via our website; 2) via instructors assigning and students paying $13.00-$16.00 per semester (depending on the school/deal that has been negotiated), and from "enterprise" or departmental levels deals.
Our ask to investors is $500K to $1M dollar investment. This will be used in the following way:
- Product and infrastructure enhancements: Software enhancements for our new AI plan, expand the platform to be more STEM friendly and make it more easily available to other disciplines guided by beta testing.
- Sales and marketing operations: hiring a sales and marketing professional (or team), expand disciplinary outreach. We need to determine the needs of users beyond history and humanities to expand the reach of the platform.
- Customer success and retention, our goal is to make the user experience better to retain our student users. Retaining the instructors and departments who use ClioVis is key. Our recent West Point enterprise deal is an example, we started off with 1 instructor using the platform in one class. Now, the history department at West Point is using the platform in their lower division survey classes. Our goal is to expand this use to classes beyond the history department at West Point next year.
- More efficacy testing. We currently have efficacy data from the University of Texas that shows that creating one ClioVis timeline helps students master much as writing 1 semester long research paper.
As of December 2024, we have built a functional platform that has served tens of thousands of users (30K+), these include individual users both inside and outside of academia, as well as a enterprise deals with a handful of educational institutions supporting students and faculty across entire departments. However, the current version of our platform started as a research project at a university and, given its origins and organic growth over the course of nearly a decade, it has become a bit difficult to extend/maintain, and the UI/UX are now a bit dated, as is often reported by our users. It is currently running on top of Vue 2, ASP.Net Core 3.x, MySQL, Kubernetes, and a number of other open source technologies. With funds from the University of Texas at Austin, we are overhauling our platform to make it more maintainable, extensible, and to bring it up to modern UI standards. We are reworking significant portions of our .NET backend as well as completely rebuilding our frontend based on mockups created for us by an external designer. We are also moving from MySQL to PostgreSQL and overhauling our real-time collaboration backend to more cost-effectively facilitate small workspaces, which would allow us to expand the scope of our free tier. Additionally, the overhauls will ensure that STEM users are well-supported, which has been a frequent feature request. We expect that these changes will help us to scale both in terms of user base and feature set.
125K from Softeq Venture Capital and an additional 200K in grants and friends and family investment.
