San Francisco-based Tract is a new edtech startup where students and teachers can learn through making and sharing educational videos within a safe web-based platform that other kids and teachers can engage with through likes and comments.
The startup was founded in 2020 by an ex-Uber product lead, Ari Memar, and his former high school teacher, the award-winning Esther Wojcicki, who is also the mother of YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki. At the time, Memar was working as a product lead at Uber, but was looking to find a way to pursue his true passion for early education.
He wasn’t sure of how he could make the biggest difference, he told Insider, until he reconnected with Wojcicki through her nonprofit organization. He realized he could use his background in tech to help her reach more students with her hands-on, project-based style of teaching.
“I was talking to her about the things she was doing, like giving kids a lot of trust and respect to work on real-world projects,” he said, adding that’s when the light bulb went off for him. “The number one thing kids want to be is a YouTube or TikTok creator. They aspire to be creators because they want to be creative, famous and teach.”
He then asked Wojcicki if he could help her share her teaching philosophy through an edtech startup where kids could feel like they’re becoming social media creators all while they learn through activities and online projects.
Wojcicki was sold, and Memar quit Uber in the summer of 2020 to focus on building Tract full time. The two came up with the idea for a secure, kid-friendly website, where teachers could upload lesson plans and kids could make video projects for their classes where they could also be teaching other Tract users with their educational videos.
Kids of all ages can use Tract, but most of the students using the platform are between 3rd and 8th grade, said Memar, “where the kids are pretty independent and capable on devices, but are still restricted from the broader internet.”
By the end of 2020, the prototype was up and running, and throughout 2021 Tract started to attract lots of attention from teachers across the US. It really picked up steam during the pandemic as parents and teachers were looking for educational content kids could use online, said Memar, and investors started taking notice.
Memar and Wojcicki had raised a small preseed round in 2021, but got connected with new investors like New Enterprise Associates, at the beginning of 2022. The firm ended up leading Tract’s $7 million seed round, which closed earlier this month. Other investors included Moving Capital, Oceans Ventures, Global Founders Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, K50 Ventures, G9 Ventures, Graph Ventures, Alumni Ventures Group, Minerva, and Correlation Ventures.
Tract already has over 30,000 members and 100,000 video projects uploaded to the site, and is currently operating in 48 states and 20 countries. The team hopes to use the new funding to expand into even more schools, and has launched its first collection of project-based lesson plans across math, English language arts, science, social studies, and art. The company also plans to remain free for teachers to use in their classrooms.
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