Knowledge Adventure Gets $5M from Azure and TeleSoft

Knowledge Adventure announced today the closing of a $5 million Series B round led by Azure Capital and TeleSoft Partners. Knowledge Adventure is in the middle of top-to-bottom change of focus, shifting its attention from traditional educational software to virtual worlds. The company announced David Lord as a new CEO in July to help with the shift as it prepared to launch its first virtual world, JumpStart, at the end of that month. The funding will go to support the change of direction by allowing JumpStart to form a new team to develop and operate its virtual world.

“Knowledge Adventure is making a very bold and exciting move into a market that has great potential for growth,” Arjun Gupta, TeleSoft founder & managing partner, said in a statement. “Kids’ software is currently about a hundred million dollar market which is poised to grow to a multi-billion dollar industry. Our investment in Knowledge Adventure is a clear indicator of the faith we have in the company’s ability to lead the pack in this growing environment.”

Comments

[Jim Hauser]

It appears as though they just launched a new website at www.jumpstart.com which looks very good, however it seems that the full virtual world is still a download client. I would venture to guess that shortly they will launch an actual virtual world product in the browser.