Startup: Startup NoRedInk Raises $2M In Venture Capital (ChicagoTribune)

When Scheur's ninth-graders turned in compositions with error-ridden sentences like the one above, he would dutifully mark every extraneous comma and misplaced modifier. But his students didn't seem to be processing the feedback. Some just glanced at the grade without bothering to look over his comments. And many repeated their mistakes in subsequent papers.



Frustrated with the broken feedback loop, Scheur started tracking common grammar errors and posted a Craigslist ad seeking an engineer to build a Web-based tool that students could use in the classroom. That project turned into a startup, NoRedInk, which is expected to announce Thursday that it has raised $2 million from investors such as Google Ventures and Chicago-based Hyde Park Venture Partners.

"I'm really excited that we're going to stay a free, personalized app," Scheur said, noting that more than 12,000 U.S. schools are using NoRedInk. "We're not worried about charging, but just focused on building these tools that help kids with every misconception of grammar."

Startup: Startup NoRedInk Raises $2M In Venture Capital (ChicagoTribune)

NoRedInk presents grammar drills in a short quiz format, displaying sentences that students correct by changing punctuation marks or rewriting a word to fix its tense. Dick and Jane are nowhere to be found in the sentences, which instead reference characters from pop culture, such as "Twilight" and "The Hunger Games." Teachers, meanwhile, can customize the assignments to target problem areas and view a color-coded dashboard that tracks individual students' progress.

Scheur, 33, left his eight-year teaching career in 2012 to focus full time on NoRedInk and relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area. He said he's not thinking about how to generate revenue from his company, whose product is free.

"We're super lucky that (our investors) buy into the big picture of what we're trying to do for schools and education," Scheur said. "So our sole focus is on adding value and building user engagement. We're not at all focused (on) anything to do with monetization. We're just all focused on content."

Catapult welcomes Scholastica
It's back-to-school time, and Catapult, a shared office space for startups in the River North neighborhood, is bidding farewell to its latest graduate and welcoming its newest class member.

Catapult opened in late 2011 in a space donated by Foley & Lardner LLP, and offers six-month leases for startups that are past the idea stage and generating revenue or have raised venture capital. When openings come up, tenants interview companies that want to join.

Catapult held its third such selection process last week, looking for a startup to replace TempoDB, a cloud computing company that has been there since May 2012. Its successor at Catapult will be Scholastica, a startup that makes an online publishing platform for academic journals.

"There's this sense of momentum that I felt with the Scholastica team and their business," said Justin DeLay, TempoDB's co-founder and chief marketing officer. "And I think there is, to a certain extent, a bit of a Catapult culture, which is, everyone here is here to build a big business and a business that matters. You can sense a certain seriousness in (the) founders."

TempoDB, which was founded in December 2011, makes technology that stores and analyzes large amounts of "time series data," or time-specific information captured by thermostats and different types of sensors. The company is planning to expand its team of six full-time employees, and "it wouldn't have been fair or in the spirit of Catapult to try to overstay our welcome," DeLay said.

Three-year-old Scholastica, meanwhile, is ready for somewhat more permanent digs after having worked out of apartments, coffee shops and the office of a River North software firm. The startup's three founders are former University of Chicago graduate students in separate disciplines (sociology, political philosophy, history) who traded the academic track for an entrepreneurial one.

"The great thing about Catapult is, everyone who's there has some traction," said Scholastica co-founder Rob Walsh, who also heads product design. He added: "We can bounce ideas off of them and they can bounce ideas off of us."

Scholastica plans to move into Catapult next month. The space houses 13 companies, and TempoDB will be its 10th graduate. Foley & Lardner has invested in several companies through a fund made up of contributions from partners. The firm's primary interest, though, is courting fast-growing startups as clients.

"At the end of the day, they're always more interested in building legal business than their investments," said Galen Mason, special counsel at Foley and a Catapult co-founder. He added: "There's an appetite and a need for big-firm lawyers … to really roll up their sleeves and understand how to work with these digital technology companies and lean companies. Catapult is the tip of the iceberg."