Top Hat Secures Additional Investor, Launches Marketplace for Higher Education

Top Hat has raised an extra $7.5 million.

The additional Series C round was led by Leaders Fund, a venture capital fund focused on investing in disruptive business-to-business software-as-a-service companies. The Toronto startup’s latest influx of capital builds on an existing $22 million Series C.

“Investing in Top Hat was an easy decision,” David Stein, Managing Partner at Leaders Fund, said of his firm’s follow-on fund. “The education technology market is notoriously difficult, but Top Hat’s educator-first approach and mission to improve classroom engagement by putting the teacher at the center really stood out to our team.”

Top Hat also announced the full release of the Top Hat Marketplace, which it describes as “a unique and game-changing resource of affordable and customizable educational content.” This educational content resource is now available to educators at most of the top 1,000 North American colleges and universities.

“We leveraged our existing relationship with educators already using our classroom engagement tools to test and launch the Marketplace,” said Mike Silagadze, cofounder of Top Hat. “This is a fundamental shift in education, and we’re excited to provide Top Hat educators with a community focused on quality content and better teaching while also creating an effective learning experience for students.”

The educational content in the Top Hat Marketplace breaks the slow-paced publishing model by allowing educators to provide one another instant feedback, the Canadian company explains; this collaborative community-sourced model means that the Marketplace’s content is continually being updated and improved upon.