Financials & Competition

Pricing and Customers:

The bulk of the content is free to access, and students or teachers are able to create accounts and track mastery of specific writing skills. No Red Ink does offer a premium subscription that unlocks more content. It is primarily focused on selling its premium subscription to schools or school boards. The process for buying a premium subscription involves signing up for an online meeting with a sales representative and the product is clearly not intended to be sold to students, parents, or even individual teachers. Beyond the individualization of activities to meet student interests and the option to unlock lessons and practice questions that are not accessible with a free subscription, the premium option allows schools to accurately track and monitor student writing data. It’s mainly marketed to school districts in the United States and boasts it’s use in 60% of districts. Although it is also used internationally, much of the content and data collection is aligned with state standards in the United States, which makes it a more natural fit for learning institutions in that country.

Financials:

In 2021 they acquired $50 million in series B financing, with the largest part of the investment coming from Susquehanna Growth Equity and True Ventures. This most recent round of financing is also their largest with only $8 million in financing being acquired by the company prior to 2021. Their revenue currently stands at $25.3 million per year and they have increased their number of employees by 51% since they received funding in 2021. As a privately owned company they have not chosen to share a great deal of their financial data and are likely not yet profitable. For a relatively new company, launched in 2017, they show a lot of promise and have proven that they are appealing to investors.

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Competitors:

Khan Academy- The content on this platform is free and formatted very differently than No Red Ink. It’s laid out as a series of courses and prioritizes instruction, with minimal practice and assessment. It also doesn’t adjust difficulty or number of questions based on student responses and doesn’t provide as much learning data to teachers.

Quill- This is a not-for-profit company that has a very similar mission and similar educational content to No Red Ink. It also offers comparable data of student learning, although it does not customize the learning experience to the student’s individual interests, which could make the learning process less engaging for students. The content is free, although premium accounts are available for purchase by teachers and school boards who require more data gathering options.

IXL- This membership-based learning program covers much of the same Language Arts material as No Red Ink. While No Red Ink has much of their content available for free and focuses on selling premium memberships to schools, IXL sells paid memberships for parents and schools to be able to access their content. For a small price increase members can access both Math and Language Arts material. It allows parents and teachers to access similar learning analytics to those provided by No Red Ink.

Prodigy- This game-based learning software was originally created only for Math instruction but has since branched out into writing and grammar instruction for students from K-5. With its engaging platform it could prove to be serious competition for No Red Ink that doesn’t use a game-based format.