(Palo Alto, CA, August 11 2020) — Polygence, a California-based EdTech company, announced raising its pre-seed round today. Investors in the round include the Alibaba Hong Kong Entrepreneurs Fund, Reach Capital, Northern Light Venture Capital and SDX Partners/SBXI. Polygence was launched from the MIT Sandbox Innovation Fund.

Polygence is a selective online academy that empowers middle and high school students to engage in publishable academic research projects. The funds will be used to enhance the project experience, recruit mentors, and expand Polygence’s presence in the US and East Asian markets.

Polygence was founded by two educators, Janos Perczel and Jin Chow, with the goal of unlocking the innate intellectual curiosity of students worldwide by increasing access to quality research mentorship.

“This pre-seed investment round will enable us to cement our position as the leading provider of online research mentorship. As a result of the COVID-19 global health crisis, online learning has become one of the most definitive trends in education industries globally”, the founders stated. “We are excited to serve students worldwide by connecting them with top-tier researcher-mentors across academic disciplines in the humanities, social sciences, and STEM.”

Polygence prides itself on its growing cohort of internationally renowned researchers and academics who are also stellar educators. With the help of these mentors, Polygence students co-design a highly individualized learning experience and create a presentable, professional-grade final product such as a published paper, conference presentation, full-length play, GitHub repo, and more.

“We were very impressed by the passion and educational mission of Polygence’s founders Jin and Janos. The model of Polygence is unique and can match brilliant research ideas with the mentors without a geographical limitation. With personalized online education on the rise, meaningful virtual research experiences will be indispensable in inspiring our generation of student scholars” said Ms. Cindy Chow, the Executive Director of the Alibaba Entrepreneurs Fund.

“As a former educator, I’ve witnessed the unparalleled power of self-directed projects to inspire student engagement and learning, and I can’t imagine a better founding team to take project-based learning mainstream” added James Kim, investor at Reach Capital, Silicon Valley’s premier EdTech venture fund.

About Polygence

Polygence was founded in 2019 in Palo Alto, California by educators Janos Perczel and Jin Yun Chow with the goal of unlocking the innate intellectual curiosity of students worldwide by increasing access to quality research mentorship. Polygence is an online educational marketplace that pairs intellectually curious high school students with seasoned researcher-mentors to pursue tailor-made research projects in academic fields across the humanities, social sciences, and STEM. 

Source: Polygence