Asobo Education, which has a home base near Southport, is one of 16 North Carolina startups selected to receive a $10,000 MICRO grant from the NC IDEA Foundation, the organization announced this week.Asobo Education founder Austin Ketola developed the online learning platform to provide students with more accessible, personalized education resources. Ketola, a recent N.C. State University grad, lives in Raleigh but goes back and forth between Raleigh and the Southport area, where his parents live.“Asobo is basically a per...
Asobo Education, which has a home base near Southport, is one of 16 North Carolina startups selected to receive a $10,000 MICRO grant from the NC IDEA Foundation, the organization announced this week.
Asobo Education founder Austin Ketola developed the online learning platform to provide students with more accessible, personalized education resources. Ketola, a recent N.C. State University grad, lives in Raleigh but goes back and forth between Raleigh and the Southport area, where his parents live.
“Asobo is basically a personalized learning platform that tries to use gamified or game-based learning to help identify and address different student learning gaps,” Ketola said.
The platform integrates an adaptive learning system and AI, and the platform’s backend offers tutors and teachers insights about a student’s learning, allowing them to track progress over time. Ketola said he aimed to make the program engaging, personalized and affordable for each student.
Since launching its MICRO grant program in 2018, NC IDEA has awarded nearly $2.4 million through the program. The grants are geared toward young companies looking to validate and advance their ideas, according to a news release. In addition to funding, grant recipients participate in an eight-week customer discovery and product launch program.
The 16 startup recipients were selected following a three-month, competitive process that drew 285 applications from entrepreneurs across the state.
Ketola said he became passionate about helping others learn while tutoring in high school. When he got to college, Ketola, who studied computer engineering and economics, knew he wanted to continue working in the tutoring space.
“As I learned more about looking into building a tutoring company that makes (tutoring) more accessible, the real issue was this kind of lack of access to personalized resources,” he said.
Ketola founded the online platform TutorSmith in 2022 before pivoting in January to developing Asobo Education. He’s wrapping up the development of a beta version of the program and is currently working on getting the program into schools for beta testing.
The grant money and resources from NC IDEA will help support the company as it grows and moves through the beta testing process. Ketola said he plans to use some of the funding to attend an upcoming education technology conference in Florida to connect with additional school systems.
Being selected for the grant is a “huge honor,” Ketola said, that he hopes will help support the platform’s ongoing development.
“(I’m) looking forward to really trying to grow this,” he said, “and as we start getting introduced in schools and building the platform to be better, the connections and everything will be super useful in the coming months.”
Similar Stories