Late Nite Labs, a web-based educational platform, announced this week that it was able to raise seed funding of $1.1 million coming from numerous angel investors such as former Chancellor Harold Levy of the public school system in New York City, as well as Don Burton, Disney Education’s former head of Business Development.
Late Nite Labs Receive Funds From New Investors
The startup that is based in New York City provides a virtual educational platform for Chemistry and Biology learning setups. Late Nite Labs offers engaging curricula that are especially helpful when actual resources are unavailable. Given the fact that there are state schools, public universities and community colleges that do not have the luxury of having functional wet labs due to economical reasons, Late Nite Labs aims to help solve this predicament with its digitized lab setting.
The virtual lab has over 150 experiment simulations. All of the simulations come fully ready with the chemicals, instruments, compounds, containers and all other materials normally found in wet labs. Educators can present and manage their classes over the Web as well as give assignments that come complete with media players, digital lab notebooks, and supporting videos and images for the experiments. The virtual lab is interactive and materials can easily be dragged and dropped.
Various schools all over the country are now using Late Nite Labs. In North Carolina alone, out of the 58 community colleges in the area, 56 are using the platform. There are over 150 schools utilizing the virtual lab coming from Oregon State, New Mexico State, Oklahoma State, Arizona State, Ole Miss, and Iowa State among others.
The startup is limitedly offered to high schools and universities but according to the team, plans of developing a consumer product as well as working into the K-12 curricula are underway. Microbiology and forensics labs classes are also in the process of development.
Harris Goodman, vice president of Business Development in Late Night Labs explained that the new funding raised will be used to expand the startup team to twelve from its original five members. The additional manpower will include sales and marketing staff as well as engineers.
Late Nite Labs sells the platform directly to students through campus bookstores or through its website. It costs an average of $50 to gain access of the virtual coursework.
