First Look: Crowdclass
First Look: Crowdclass
NFT Badges & Credentials for Education
Company: Crowdclass
Deck: Here
Raising: €500k EUR
Team, Vision & Value Proposition
Why Crowdclass and how did you meet your co-founder? 🏃♂️🏃♂️
We’re university friends! We both studied software engineering in 2005 and lived together for a couple of months.
I have a passion for education and founded an EdTech startup in 2012. We’ve both been involved with the Web3 space for a while, so we started looking at how to build a bridge between the two.
What is your vision and mission as founders? 🚀
Our vision is to transform how skills, learnings and achievements are recognised into what we call 'user-owned, decentralised and peer-to-peer recognition.’
We enable schools to issue certificates with a lower risk of fraud. At the same time, students can own and use them to manage their achievements. Through these certificates, they can collect badges and credentials so future employers can quickly and easily verify their skills and learnings.
What core problems are you solving? ✨
The inefficiency in verifying credentials. Companies spend billions of dollars per year on screening services.
Many skills and learnings need to be verifiable because they don't come with a certificate or proof of achievement.
What is your biggest challenge currently? 🔨
Finding PMF. We have been iterating a lot around core needs.
The macro envrionemnt. We have become more effective in managing our resources in the best possible way.
Product
What are the key features of your current product? 👨💻
We are focused on two segments - courses and events.
Our current product is in private beta. It allows organisers to easily create digital badges and certificates that can be used as verifiable assets, whether for proof of learning or proof of attendance.
On the other side, we have developed a way for the certificate receiver to claim their badges as NFTs and save them in their wallet.
Where is the product going? 💪
We see the product becoming a bigger app ecosystem that serves three core stakeholders: issuers, claimers and verifiers.
We're still very focused on the issuers and the claimers right now. For claimers, we want to add social features (sharing badges, adding other wallets etc). For the issuers, we will provide better analytics, access to APIs, white labelling etc.
And later down the line, we also want to build better verification tools. E.g., a token-gated job that only people with a certificate or set of credentials will have access to.
Market
What is driving growth in this market? 📈
The user-owned and decentralised movement is a key element of growth for us and the huge fragmentation of how learning now accrues. Careers are more dynamic now than ever, and the skills we learn today might be different from the skills we need in 5-10 years.
What are the biggest challenges within Web3 currently? 🕸️
Web3 is the vehicle for our value proposition. How can we leverage Web3 technologies to become as invisible as possible, where people are part of Web3 without realising they are?
The usability of wallets, or how people manage their assets on Web3, has to improve greatly.
What do you believe is the key to winning in this market? 🔑
To be aligned about the Web3 ethos on the backend, yet make the Web3 component as invisible as possible by creating user-friendly and familiar consumer experiences.
Fundraise
What are you looking to raise now, and what will you use this funding for? 💸
We are raising €500k EUR. Our goal with the funding is to speed up product development and user growth for a larger seed round next year.