MasteryPrep, the local education tech company that prepares students for the ACT college readiness test, has secured $3.6 million in financing that will be used to help the three-year-old company expand its reach and update its educational products.
The Catalyst Group, a local evergreen fund that invests in early-stage companies, led the debt and equity financing round. Other participants included Liquid Ventures, Jennifer and Sean Reilly, Maple Leaf, the Frazer family, Advantage Capital and others.
“The business has grown significantly in the past year,” says Jared Loftus, MasteryPrep chief revenue officer and co-founder. “But in that growth we’ve realized a lot of things about our products and what we can do better, so a lot of this investment will be going to product development … revamping and updating our curriculum.”
Company founder Craig Gehring, who obtained perfect scores on the ACT and SAT while a student at Baton Rouge High in the late 1990s, developed most of the company’s original portfolio of educational products, which includes workbooks, interactive materials, professional development for teachers and testing and analysis services.
“Now we have a team of product creation folks who are content experts in specific areas,” Loftus says. “So we’re not just relying on Craig. We have a whole team to help.”
MasteryPrep currently is used in over 600 schools in more than a dozen states, providing school-based ACT preparation to under-resourced students. Since 2012, the company has served over 100,000 students and revenues in 2015 will approach $5 million, Loftus says.
Plans discussed in 2013 for MasteryPrep to expand into other high-stakes testing preparation have been shelved for now because the company has found a niche in which it excels—ACT test prep—and decided to concentrate in that area alone.
“We’ve had such success with the ACT we are doubling down on that,” Loftus says.
—Stephanie Riegel
