Knack is a Florida-based EdTech startup that has caused the university peer support marketplace to drastically evolve. The reason Knack gives online-to-offline peer support new meaning is because it allows academically sound university students to sign up and offer one-on-one tutoring/mentoring sessions on their campuses. In turn, the company builds competency or ‘knack’ profiles on their students, thus providing potential employers with vetted potential entry-level hires. Aside from providing just archaic resume-related details, Knack is able to offer employers human insight into each tutor via the feedback provided after every tutoring session.
“We realized that peer tutoring is about much more than one student helping another with an academic subject; it is two students coming from different places, learning to complete a task together. And we view it as a training ground for students to further develop the soft skills necessary to be valued members of today’s workplace.”
– Samyr Qureshi, CEO
Finding your Knack. Knack was launched in 2016 by four founders who saw the need to insert relevance, effectiveness, and enjoyment into traditional university tutoring systems.
The aim of Knack is to ultimately build a physical community of students through technology.
Company CEO, Samyr Qureshi, started the business based on his lifelong goal to ensure that every motivated student, regardless of their social and economic background, was given the chance to acquire the skills required for university and beyond. Through tutoring with Knack, students’ communication, collaboration, and critical thinking skills improve, thus making them valuable assets for companies like PWC and Connectwise.
According to Jennifer Locklear, Chief Talent Officer at Connectwise, “Partnering with Knack was an easy decision. It not only gives us the chance to engage with top-tier talent but also to invest in our future workforce leaders who will, in turn, help us create a better tomorrow.”
Most universities have on-campus tutoring centers, but what sets Knack apart from all the others is that it fills the gaps that other tutoring courses have, by increasing course coverage for tougher upper-level courses that onsite centers may not be able to cover due to budgetary and resource constraints. “We realized that peer tutoring is about much more than one student helping another with an academic subject; it is two students coming from different places, learning to complete a task together. And we view it as a training ground for students to further develop the soft skills necessary to be valued members of today’s workplace,” asserts Qureshi.
VALUES AND MISSION
The company’s proposed mission is to equip students to be able to discover their knack whilst simultaneously getting people to empower each other to become lifelong learners from those around them. At Knack, academic integrity, relevant and professional tutors, and immediate action are vital to the experience.
FUTURE-FORWARD
Certain companies do make an innovative impact, and Knack is surely one of them. First and foremost, since the official launch of the company in the Fall of 2016, it has achieved a 145% semester-over-semester growth rate. The company has also gone live in over 50 campuses. To date, it has processed thousands of tutoring sessions with a staggering 98% satisfaction rate. Aside from other partnerships, Knack is affiliated with Arizona State University as a portfolio company.
It should come as no surprise that Knack is gaining a good number of public and private partnerships. University of Arizona State University Enterprise Partners Chief Executive Officer, R. F “Rick” Shangraw Jnr., has also expressed his excitement in collaborating with and investing in Knack.
With a dedicated team of six full-time Tampa Bay-based employees, the company is sure to exceed the $1.5M in seed funding that they have already raised.
