May 12, 2021
SOUTH BEND, Ind. — STUDIA.app, a startup focused on helping students study science, today announced a $20,000 investment from Elevate Ventures’ Community Ideation Fund.
STUDIA.app offers a website that helps high school and college students study for science classes through multilingual examples and step-by-step solutions. The South Bend-based company uses diverse illustrations and terminology to enable students of various backgrounds to understand the explanations.
“The STUDIA.app team has a passion for education, as well as complementary skill sets that allow them to be effective and creative,” said Nicholas Kuhn, Elevate Ventures’ entrepreneur-in-residence serving Startup South Bend-Elkhart, a partnership that supports entrepreneurs in north-central Indiana. “STUDIA.app’s educational technology platform is a major benefit to science [and soon all STEM] students and I look forward to seeing their growth.”
STUDIA.app was founded in 2020 by Sebastián Murgueitio Ramírez, Ph.D., CEO; Leonardo Uribe Castaño, vice president; and Stacy Sivinski, Ph.D., communications specialist and illustrator. The company launched a pilot program with 250 students and now offers a paid subscription service. Teachers and educators can sign up for free. Currently, 70 teachers across the United States use STUDIA.app.
The company will use the funding from Elevate to expand advertising, add more functions and examples to the website, and translate all of its content into Spanish.
“For our team at STUDIA.app, receiving funding means continuing to expand our company in a way that helps students become more confident and engaged,” said Sivinski. “We know that many students, especially those coming from underprivileged backgrounds, struggle when it comes to mastering these difficult topics, and any funding that we receive is a step toward making the learning process easier for them.”
STUDIA.app is a 2020 winner of the McCloskey New Venture Competition from the IDEA Center at the University of Notre Dame, where it received the College of Science Award. The company will pitch for a seed award in the Elevate Nexus Regional Pitch Competition on May 18, 2021.
Elevate’s Community Ideation Fund is made possible through its partnership with Startup South Bend-Elkhart. The Community Ideation Fund is available through the state’s 21st Century Research and Technology Fund, which is overseen by the Indiana Economic Development Corp. and promotes economic growth and innovation-driven public-private partnerships in Indiana.
