GES 2014: Cloudents centralizes content and collaboration for students

Cloudents, who took home the “people’s choice” award in the Israeli GES competition, was officialy founded only in April 2014, but since then it has managed to make headways in the Israeli market, and even outside of Israel.

The company provides students a central location in which they could share content related to their studies, such as classes summaries and transcriptions, tests and answers, and other formal and informal content. “Instead of using multiple online services, such as a storage service for the documents, a chat or e-mail service to communicate between them, Facebook to find other students in the same class or subject – we are offering a centralized enviroment which includes all the nessecary tools”, says Cloudents’ founder Eidan Apelbaum.

Cloudents’ founder Eidan Apelbaum

The content the students share – which can be documents, movies or links – can be previewed within the platform itself, and they can add annotations and collaborate on top of it. Another feature is the ability to create quizzes to test each other, and the results of the quizzes are analyzed and help them understand which topics still need to be worked on. Also, students get points and badgets for helping each other.  

Currently, more than 65% of higher-education students in Israel are connected to Cloudents’ platform, through 43 education partners. The company has also registered users in the U.K, Netherlands and Russia, and will expand in these countries, and othe E.U countries and Asia, in the following months. More than 110k documents have already been shared through the service.

The service is offered to the students for free, and Cloudents hopes to get revenue from two major channels: customized onlines stores offering each student community with relevant products or services (some of which can be purchased with accumulated points), and an online marketplace which would enable companies or individuals to offer services like online video private tutoring, etc.

Cloudents has raised $800k so far and is in the proccess of raising more money. It employs 5 people. Prior to founding Cloudents, Apelbaum worked at Yahoo U.S and sold his previous start-up, Multimi, to security company AVG.