Byju’s buys Osmo for $120M to add blended learning to its education business | Hacker News Reader

Byju’s buys Osmo for $120M to add blended learning to its education business

techcrunch.com

68 pointserohead12 comments

Hi all, I'm Mike from Osmo. Figured this might be the right audience, but if you'd like to try your hand at making apps compatible with our tangible pieces, check out sdk.playosmo.com. Sign up at the form located at that site, and show us what you come up with!

congrats to them. I have nothing but good things to say about Osmo, its a quality product that teaches very well and doesn't have many (any?) dark patterns to drive reoccurring revenue.

Whats in the box is what it is, and whether its the creative stuff which my kid loves or the math/spelling it keeps him engaged and uses technology to augment physical world learning very well.

There are so many apps from Osmo. Which ones are you talking about?

Creative Genius he’s had for about two years, I think it was their “flagship” kit for much of that time. It includes tangrams, math, spelling, a couple creative drawings game and a physics game of redirecting bouncing balls towards targets. Thats the one I would recommend without hesitation for any kid pre-k to mid-elementary.

He also got the pizza game one that teaches about money math and making peoples orders over the holidays and has had a good time with it.

On the complete fun side he also got the mindracers set for the holidays, very little educational value there but he’s had a great time playing with it and I think kids like having something tangible to go along with their games.

Thank you!

I had exactly the opposite experience. I found the Osmo terrible and my son lost interest extremely quickly. Their Hot Wheels game has nothing educational about it, it's a racing game where you drop tokens on the viewing area. Even as a game it's boring, but the complete lack of educational value is what really ticked me off.

The other games are extremely limited, and get old quickly, which is disappointing considering how expensive they are.

Leapfrog is much more educational and interesting for kids and much cheaper too.

I'm glad Byju is sharing the wealth with good people, but I'm extremely skeptical of the models of education it is all based on. Check out the book “class clowns" on the common mistakes investors make in the edu sector. That said, less than .05% of edu funding goes towards digital content, about $100/kid in america. For all subjects.

Byju Raveendran's profile https://factordaily.com/byju-raveendran-profile/

Great to see indian unicorns expand outwards into other markets.

I was going through a list of recent VC investments in China [1] and noticed a ton of large education startups (targeted at kids mostly) were very common. From previous experience I've seen a lot coming out of India too.

It's interesting to see the priority placed on education on those societies is being reflected in the types of companies that are successful (at funding at a minimum).

[1] For example

- Kada Story ($14M) https://kada.hhdd.com

- Kaishu Jianggushi raised $37M: http://www.kaishuai.com/tag-view-k-jianggushi.html

- Mrs Wordsmith's lead investor of last round was Chinese VC fund ($13M): https://www.mrswordsmith.com

The second link is a referral shopping page without any information about the company. This url also appears on their crunchbase page. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/kaishu-jianggushi#se...

Well I found it on crunchbase and the shopping page explains the product well enough (just like how Amazon product pages are often better than the company website).

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