Check out our latest podcast – it’s all about the funding journey of Kami, a digital classroom platform used by 90% of kindergarten to twelfth-grade schools in the US. The conversation is between Anna Guenther, co-host of The Funding Files and co-founder of PledgeMe, and Alliv Samson, one of the co-founders of Kami.

Alliv delves into Kami’s beginnings in 2012 as a university project called Notable, designed to make lectures more interactive. Initially, they faced challenges in monetizing the product and gaining traction, leading to a pivot from targeting university students to focusing on PDF annotation for a broader audience.

Alliv shares the company’s early funding experiences, from a $10,000 seed round in 2013 to subsequent rounds through local and international investors to a partial sell out in 2024 and huge returns for investors.

She emphasizes the importance of product-led growth, driven by user feedback, which eventually led them to focus on the EdTech sector around 2016. A pivotal moment was attending an EdTech conference in the US with support from an Education New Zealand grant, where they discovered the specific needs of teachers using Chromebooks and digital textbooks – and had one of their users literally cry at the reduction in her workload thanks to their product.