This startup is using robots to teach kids code, and is backed by Tencent and MindWorks

Disclosure: The author is not affiliated with any of the organizations mentioned in the article below.

As a father of three children, one of the largest stressors in my life has been the future of my children’s education. We live in Hong Kong, and the education system here is extremely competitive and exorbitantly expensive.

As someone who is acutely aware of the digital economy we currently live in, I naturally began to question the true value of traditional education, which tends to lack focus in science and technology. As it turns out, I’m not the only parent out there with these sentiments. Vikas Gupta taught himself to code while he was in high school, and went on to work for some of the largest tech companies in the world, including Google and Amazon.

When his daughter was born, he took a six-month sabbatical. It was then that he conceived the idea of building a robotics company that can help his daughter become a creator and innovator, not just a book-smart scholar.

Frustrated by a lack of opportunities for children to learn programming, the early version of his edtech startup, Wonder Workshop, was born.

What is Wonder Workshop?

Wonder Workshop is a Silicon Valley-based education and robotics startup that manufactures robots that help children to learn to program with their own commands and simple coding. Programmable robots are a rapidly growing market segment and many tech-savvy parents are betting on the fact that coding may soon be the most important subject or language for their children to learn in school.

The robotics startup, which was recently endorsed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, offers programmable robots or “CleverBots” in three models: Dash, Dot, and Cue.

Working off of an MIT research that proves that children can learn programming concepts as early as six years old, the company produces robots Dash and Dot directly from a mobile device (Apple and Android). For older children ages 11 and up, there is the more advanced Cue robot, which is now being used in over 12,000 classrooms globally. These robots are available for purchase on the company’s online store and Amazon.

Wonder Workshop also hosts an annual Wonder League Robotics competition across 57 countries, with more than 20,000 children competing. Notably, half of the participants in this competition are girls, proving that the stereotype associated with boys dominating computer science and engineering is changing.

See also: These misconceptions explain why women hold only 2 in 10 tech jobs

From humble crowdfunding beginnings

The company was originally founded as Play-i back in 2012, and Gupta decided to crowdfund the initial project. But after looking into platforms like Kickstarter or Indiegogo, he quickly realized that the demographic of project backers did not overlap with his target customer—parents of children aged between five and 10. Gupta also wanted direct access to the analytics and control the user experience, so he and his co-founder launched their own website using Selfstarter.

By using a combination of social media, word of mouth, and online advertising, they were able to hit their goal of US$250,000 in just four days. After a month, they were able to raise US$1.44 million from over 11,000 pre-orders. The founders quickly realized they had a solid proof of concept and were able to secure venture funding to scale more quickly.

Wonder Workshop has just announced that it has closed its US$41 million series C funding round, which includes investments from Tencent Holdings, MindWorks Ventures, and SoftBank Korea.

Future plans