Kempus wants to be the best app for sharing college tips TechCrunch

Remember to take a look at the evaluations on Price My Professors to seek out out which professor is good-looking and who offers the Ace simply. The professor and sophistication ranking web site is among the few net 1.0 websites nonetheless good and alive right this moment. when was the portal Acquired In 2018, the information feed service had a month-to-month consumer base of 6 million by Chedder.

Lengthy-term relevance affected Jae Leeis a South Korean serial entrepreneur educated within the USA and residing in Singapore, however the web site is nowhere close to excellent. For instance, identities haven’t been verified, so there isn’t any solution to look at the validity of evaluations. In the end, Lee suggests in an interview that college students view it as a “enjoyable” web site slightly than one thing critical on which they base their course selections.

Nonetheless, the recognition of ratemyprofessors.com signifies that college students want a spot the place they can assist one another of their school expertise. Lee and co-founder Danny Woo so he got down to construct kempusAn nameless on-line neighborhood for US school college students.

Specifically, Kempus goals to create a repository of data to assist college students attain their final aim, “the upside of incomes a school diploma,” in Lee’s phrases. This data, or what the founder calls a “distinctive dataset in larger training,” can vary from professor rankings to secondhand textbook shopping for suggestions, housing evaluations, and the right way to get recommendation on campus.

“We’re democratizing entry to data, beginning with course evaluations,” Lee says.

Based in August 2022, Kempus lately raised $3 million in a seed spherical from Bithumb Korea, a serious cryptocurrency alternate in South Korea, however the founding firm says it has no plans to affiliate itself with cryptocurrencies.

Based on Lee, the explanation we’re getting cash from Bithumb is as a result of Kempus is principally an information enterprise, so we “chosen to current our concept to a seed investor who has prior investments in a data-driven enterprise, together with however not restricted to Blockchain below their portfolio.”

self-directed

Quite a lot of experiences point out that adolescents specifically prone to social media harm. Whereas bold startups like Fizz entice buyers to the “subsequent Fb” by citing “protected and personal” social networks for school college students, Kempus is positioning itself as a “neighborhood” that attracts extra on college students’ experiences and data.

Customers are nameless, however their identities are verified through their faculty e-mail and may solely be a part of their college neighborhood. To advertise a protected surroundings, Kempus has created a self-directed mechanism the place college students can flag unhealthy actors. “We’re not mega social media within the Philippines the place we are able to rent 1000’s of individuals to average content material, so first tier [of filtering] neighborhood,” says Lee.

The second tier is Kempus itself, which rewards college students with factors for his or her content material contributions. In doing so, the corporate goals to be a facilitator slightly than a moderator or censor.

To draw first-time customers, Kempus reaches out to scholar associations and college members at universities. It simply launched its MVP (minimal viable product) in late January, so it is too early to inform if it has discovered a product-market match. Whereas course evaluations might look like a distinct segment, Lee thinks a slender focus is exactly the strategic benefit of the enterprise.

“A lot of punches have been thrown at fixing the issue of upper training as an entire… However I believe there are a number of features, a number of classes which have very deep roots in society and the human race and are a really tough drawback to unravel as a result of it could possibly be solved. “It could possibly be about politics,” he says. “We’re not right here to unravel larger training as an entire as an issue. We attempt to concentrate on the underside up.”