Amazon said today that it has reached an agreement to acquire education company TenMarks. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but it is expected that it will close in Q4 FY2013.
By having TenMarks in its corner, Amazon hopes it will bolster its educational offering, allowing it to create useful content and applications across multiple platforms to benefit the learning experience for teachers, parents, and students.
Backed by $3 million in investments from Catamount Ventures, Birchmere Ventures, and debt funding, TenMarks focuses on helping maximize teacher effectiveness in the classroom with an emphasis on mathematics. To date, it’s being used by students in over 25,000 schools and 7,000 districts throughout the United States. It says that it has a desire to “positively impact” the lives of over 20 million students by 2016.
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Dave Limp, Amazon’s Vice President for its Kindle division, said in a statement:
Amazon and TenMarks share the same passion for student learning. TenMarks’s award-winning math programs have been used by tens of thousands of schools and Amazon engages with millions of students around the world through our Kindle ecosystem. Together, Amazon and TenMarks intend to develop rich educational content and applications, across multiple platforms, that we think teachers, parents and students will love.
It’s not surprising that Amazon is going after additional educational-focused companies. The online retail giant is looking to improve its learning credentials by diversifying what students can be educated on with its Kindle tablet. Currently, the company has Whispercast, a free self-service tool that schools can use to manage a reading program.
But why spend all your time on the Kindle simply reading when you can do other things, such as mathematics? Considered to be the language of the universe, math is an important subject for students to understand before they matriculate into adulthood.
This is the latest education startup that Amazon has acquired. In February 2012, it picked up Seattle-based TeachStreet, which was an online marketplace that matched students and teachers (it has since been shuttered).
Photo credit: David McNew/Getty Images
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