Amazon acquires e-learning startup TenMarks Education co-founded by techTribe founder Rohit Agarwal

E-commerce giant Amazon Inc has signed an agreement to acquire California-based TenMarks Education Inc, a provider of web-based solutions for teachers and parents to deliver mathematics curriculum to students. While the financial details of the transaction were not disclosed, the acquisition is expected to complete later this month, TenMarks co-founder Rohit Agarwal said in a statement.

"TenMarks' math programmes have been used by tens of thousands of schools and Amazon engages with millions of students around the world through the Kindle ecosystem. Together, we intend to develop educational content and applications, across multiple platforms, which we think teachers, parents and students will love," said Dave Limp, VP, Amazon Kindle.

The startup was co-founded by Agarwal (CEO) in 2009. He earlier founded India-focused career networking portal techTribe Networks, which had raised funding from Canaan Partners India in 2007. However, techTribe was shut down in 2009 as its business model did not work out. TenMarks offers personalised online math instruction and practice for K-12 students in a clear, manageable format with the help of hints, video lessons and real-time results. It claims its programme is used by students across 25,000 schools and 7,000 districts in the US.

 "Amazon is a perfect partner for TenMarks as it completely shares our vision of creating personalised learning experiences for students via adaptive learning and 1:1 computing. With Amazon behind us, we will be able to significantly extend our ability to create learning content and platforms, and expand beyond math to language, arts and other local curricula for both schools and families," said Agarwal.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)