We are pleased to welcome Knack!
Friends of Meyer Keith, we would like to take this opportunity to introduce you to our latest portfolio company, Knack. Meyer Keith provided the financing to close-out the companies latest round of funding.
Knack is a new tutoring platform for higher education. Using their unique B2B2C platform approach, Knack partners with universities to streamline their student support services.
In the past year, Knack has gone from 4 major university clients to more than 30, resulting in a greater than 10x increase in revenues.
The team at Knack noticed that many traditional academic resource / learning centers ("tutoring centers"), are bogged down with administrative bloat, and only serve a fraction of the student body.
Prior to partnering with Knack, universities typically spent 70-80% of their student learning support budgets on administrative overhead, providing student tutors for only the 10-15 core "weed-out" classes while reaching only 20-25% of the student body with their learning support services.
After partnering with Knack, universities have seen the overall cost to administer their learning support programs drop by 20% on average, while the program's penetration increases from ~20% to ~80%. Universities that have adopted Knack's platform have also seen student retention rates double; a statistic that directly affects a university's bottom line. However, from a student's perspective, one of the most valuable parts of the Knack platform is that it enables tutoring support for all classes offered by a university, not just the handful of core classes.
Knack lets universities set their own criteria for student tutors, while handling the payment and 1099s of the student tutors, providing training before they take on students, and making a variety of resources available for both tutors and students alike.
We look forward to working with Knack as they continue to grow and are excited to see them execute on their vision. In the meantime, there are two areas that the company could use help with:
University contacts: If you know anyone in, or have a relationship with the dean, provost, or development offices at a university, please let us know.
Senior Salespeople: Knack is currently looking to make hires to build out their sales team as they expand. If you or anyone you know is a first-rate salesperson, please get in touch.
Charles & Alex