Austin—Aceable has raised $4 million in a Series A round of funding to help it further expand its line of online testing products beyond driver’s education.
The round was co-led by earlier investors Silverton Partners in Austin and Floodgate in Palo Alto, CA. In total, the startup has raised $8.7 million, including a $3 million round announced in October last year.
Aceable, which was founded in 2013, started by offering driver’s ed testing via phone or tablet.
In the last two years, Aceable says it has captured about 35 percent of the online driver’s ed course market in Texas and California, where it first began selling its product.
The startup will use the money raised to deploy its driver’s ed product in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Indiana. Also, Aceable is developing curriculum in other testing areas such as professional certifications in real estate, human resources, nursing, and food safety.
“We created a cutting-edge delivery system; now, we need great content to put on that platform,” says Blake Garrett, Aceable’s founder and CEO. “We’re hiring experts in a specific field and pair them with educational writers and instructional designers to create our courses.”
The company’s number of users has grown to about 300,000 from 100,000 last year, but only a fraction are paid users, Garrett says. He says content such as practice test questions for a driver’s exam are available for free.
Garrett says Aceable’s mission is to make these sorts of required classes more like video games with leader boards and other features that make engaging in the coursework more fun.
“The number one complaint we hear from professionals in the fields that we’re exploring is that course content is boring at best—and irrelevant at worst,” Garrett says. “We know we can fix both of these problems the same way we did with driving.”
