Swedish DigiExam Expands To Britain

    Swedish EdTech startup DigiExam has entered British market through deal with Cass Business School of City University London, and is focusing increasingly on the large education markets of Britain and the United States.

    The 2011-founded company has discovered its niche in the EdTech revolution and signed up teachers around the world to use the service which digitizes exams, making them much faster to review.

    “All startups in this sector are struggling with the budgets, we are lucky that we solve a real problem for schools,” DigiExam cofounder Johan Hägglund told ArcticStartup in an interview. “School sector has been moving very very slowly, but we see a huge shift coming,” he said, expecting money which is saved from decreasing prices of hardware to be directed into software investments.

    Like many other EdTech startups DigiExam enters the market through innovative teachers, offering them free access to test the service and then sells licenses to the schools. “With 10 teachers using it its easier to convince the principle to buy it,” Hägglund said.

    Hägglund and his cofounders understood the problem when they studied at Stockholm School of Economics, and had to pick up the pen and start filling papers at a time when everything else was already fully online. Universities share their courses and some Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) become truly massive with thousands of participants from all over the world, offering a completely new way of looking at the higher education.

    “I am very excited about this but it still need to prove a lot of things. They force universities to rethink their business models,” Hägglund said.

    DigiExam has so far raised $1.5 million seed round to start off from Swedish angels, including Sven Hagströmer (Founder of Avanza Bank and Creades, former chairman of Klarna), Jeremias Andersson (Founder of Academic Work), Spotify’s Gustaf Söderström (CPO) and Sophia Bendz (Former CMO).