Middle school and high school students are both the easiest and most difficult targets. If you’re developing a neat little video game, they’ll be willing to download it right away. But if you’re developing a learning app like the Revyze team, good luck.
Nonetheless, this French startup has defied the odds and attracted one million users over the past two years. In June, the Revyze app ranked #1 in free downloads on the Apple App Store.
A third of all Year 9 students in France choose Revyze for their last-minute study ahead of national secondary school exams. Nearly 2,000 content creators shared 40,000 videos and quizzes on the app. The total number of views reached 150 million.
All this traction has helped the startup promote its funding. On Monday, Revyze announced that it had closed a 5.5 million euro ($6 million at current exchange rates) seed round led by Speedinvest and Moonfire.
Motier Ventures, Station F (where the startup is currently headquartered), Supercell co-founder Illka Paananen, King co-founders Riccardo Zacconni and Sebastian Knusson, and Duolingo’s Nickey Skarstad also participated.
Revyze previously raised a pre-seed round of 2 million euros (about $2.2 million) in 2022.
non-examination season
But Revyze’s journey in the United States was not so smooth and easy.
When we first covered startups, it was simple. The idea was to build the TikTok of education. TikTok has great learning videos, but its users’ feeds are diluted with live, true crime stories. all (Imagine this writer waving his hand in the air).
In 2023, the team decided to launch the app in the United States. TikTok faces various challenges in the market. Many American parents are concerned about content issues, and local lawmakers are also going after TikTok over national security concerns. So Revyze’s positioning as an alternative, education-focused platform could work. At least on paper.
“I moved to the US exactly a year ago and spent four months there,” co-founder Guillaume Perrot told TechCrunch. “The goal was to replicate what we did in France and build the company around the SAT (Main College Admissions Test) period, which is a time of stress and testing in the United States.”
However, they found that this did not necessarily lead to strong and consistent user growth. Maybe the content wasn’t enough or wasn’t as specific as the SAT exam. “What we really learned was that we had to rework the product before we tried to expand into the United States,” he added.
Although the app worked well right before a particularly stressful exam, US users didn’t open it for the rest of the year. So they started from scratch to find a way to create more consistent engagement.
The Revyze team has refined the app experience so that it’s not just a vertical video feed that forces learning on people who are sufficiently stressed about their upcoming exams to spend every waking moment studying. Content is now curated to help users either enjoy the app at a more leisurely pace or stay more focused. That means we now look to TikTok and Duolingo for inspiration.
“We launched a product called Capsule with the idea of getting people to use the app for weekly testing,” Perrot said.
Capsules are designed by Revyze’s top content creators around a single topic. A collection of videos, quizzes and summary sheets. It’s a bit similar to Duolingo’s lessons. There is a beginning, middle, and end, so you can feel a sense of accomplishment when you finish the capsule.
There are also some gamification features surrounding the capsule. “Just like in Duolingo with Serial Flames, you can come back every day and unlock capsules with the coins you earn by taking daily quizzes,” co-founder Florent Sciberras told TechCrunch.
“(Capsules) also allows top creators to monetize their content. We have introduced a creator monetization program for the top 5% of each universe. Let’s say you live in Michigan and you took a math test. The math test is a bit Michigan-specific. ‘I know what they need. You can say, ‘I can create content and I can get a portion of the coins that go toward my capsules,’” Sciberras said.
Although everything is still free, Revyze plans to monetize the app at some point by adding paid access to additional features like personalized analytics and social features, and by allowing users to pay to unlock content faster. It’s a plan.
Today, Revyze remains focused on finding product-market fit and growing its community of users and content creators. The best creator communities are incredibly diverse. While there are top-performing teens who want to give back and share their knowledge, there are also teachers who want to reach a wider audience.
This is especially noticeable when startups invite their community of creators to Station F. “A 10th grade student rubs shoulders with a 45-year-old history teacher from Agen,” Sciberras said. “And they are all here with one goal in mind: to help students learn differently.”
