A platform that connects schools with temporary and full-time teachers as well as teaching assistants plans to double its workforce to 200 in just six months.
Zen Educate has secured a £19.3 million Series A extension round to continue to grow its platform across the UK, support further market expansion in the United States – where it has already seen explosive growth – and complete its first acquisitions to consolidate the market.
Zen Educate has tripled in size year-on-year and is approaching nearly one million hours of cover booked on its platform in the last 12 months.
The investment was led by Brighteye Ventures, Adjuvo and several notable private investors and family offices, including Simon Rogerson and Chris Hulatt, the founders of Octopus Group.
Tim Throsby, Adjuvo member and former CEO of Barclays Bank Plc, has also invested and will join the company’s board.
Zen Educate’s online platform provides a secure one-stop shop to solve a school’s staffing needs, giving schools and teachers an online alternative to recruitment agencies. It also provides teachers with all the useful information they need to work at each location and better ways to communicate and manage relationships with the schools.
The startup claims to have already saved the UK education system approximately £10m that would have been wasted on recruitment agency fees and connected thousands of teachers to job opportunities.
The platform uses proprietary software to perform an extensive series of checks during the teacher sign-up process to ensure all professionals listed are thoroughly vetted before a final manual review of each profile.
“This significantly oversubscribed extension to our Series A validates the progress we’ve been making in our mission to change the world of temporary work in schools,” said Slava Kremerman, co-founder and CEO.
“We are proud to say we have saved the UK education system millions of pounds each year, which is why we are excited about our growth and expansion into the US market.”
Zen Educate is headquartered in London, with offices in three other UK cities and two American cities. The company has grown rapidly since it was founded in 2017 by Kremerman and Oren Cohen.
Kremerman previously was a member of the leadership team at Nutmeg, one of the UK’s most successful technology startups. Cohen most recently ran the UK office of Optimizely, a prominent Silicon Valley technology company.
Throsby said: “I am very excited to join the Zen Educate Board. Having spent a lot of time with the team, I firmly believe this is an exceptional business doing genuine good in the world.”