Interactive textbook maker, Inkling had a Series B funding which raised 17 million USD for the company. Sequoia Capital, Pearson Education and Jafco Ventures were part funders and it was led by Tenaya Capital. Matt MacInnis, CEO of Inkling commented in a recent interview that the market for textbook in US is huge and last year it had amounted up to 16 billion USD. In comparison, trade books(literary non-fiction, fiction, everything else) were worth 15 billion USD. On Inklings monetary terms, it is not yet known as to how much amount of money was poured in when the series A rounds were on.
Based in San Francisco, Inklings has planned to use the funding for many purposes but one of the main elements is to hire many more employees. This would help them in meeting them the appetite it does see from traditional textbook publishers which is growing. Om a recent interview, MacInnis said that the demand is effectively unlimited. Inkling currently has employee count up to 60, but there are hundreds of workers offshore who work on formatting books. However MacInnis said that he expected the latter’s count to go up to thousands in the year to come. But he stressed saying that the company was looking out at increasing the employee count who have good talent.
Talking about the demand for digital textbooks, MacInnis said that medical textbooks were topping the best sellers list, but the eagerness is quite high for the back-to-school season on the whole. The company is majorly targeting those graduate schools and colleges who have been adapting to iPads for students. The funding would even be used for the expansion of the company’s current headquarters which would go up to 20,000 square feet from 10,000 square feet. Phrasing this expansion, MacInnis said that they were focusing on doubling down on their approach.
For the future to come, Inklings plans to move ahead of just textbooks and to expand its broad base to many other books, but MacInnis didn’t reveal as to which and what kind of expansion would it be. MacInnes is confident that the funding they are provided with will help them strengthen their stand in the world of digital textbooks and would be able to be in a position to be a big standalone business.
Looking at the company’s past, it was founded by Pearson and McGraw Hill in 2009. Pearson and McGraw were publishers who aimed at rebuilding college textbooks which were used on iPad. it was however more than just converting a traditional textbook to PDF. Inklings added unique interactive features to their conversion which makes them stand apart against many such digital textbook converters. The added features were audio visual applications and 3-D models for each and every title.
The competitors would even be eying into this funding as Inkling is in a field where the competition is really high. Kno Inc., which is an e-learning startup based in California, had pivoted recently that it was working towards becoming a pure-play educational software company. But the problem for Inkling is not done with even yet as Barnes & Noble and bookselling giant Amazon have even entered the world of digitalizing textbooks. There is a great market space which is still not yet utilized and there can still be many more big shots attempting to enter their brand to the digital textbook world. The emergence of interests were even seen from Facebook when they acquired Push Pop Press which is an e-book startup, the amount was however not disclosed.
This app for iPad can be downloaded from here.