Remember when we looked at Rate My Professors reviews to see which professors looked good and who gave As easily? Professor and class rating sites are one of the few Web 1.0 sites still alive and well today. is one of When the portal was acquired by news streaming service Chedder in 2018, it boasted a monthly user base of 6 million.
Its enduring relevance has impressed Jae Lee, a US-educated Korean serial entrepreneur living in Singapore, but the site is far from perfect. For example, your identity is not verified, so there is no way to scrutinize the validity of your review. After all, students see it as a “fun” site, not something serious to base their course decisions on, Lee suggests in an interview.
Still, the popularity of ratemyprofessors.com shows that students need a place where they can help each other through their college experience. Lee and his co-founder Danny Wu set out to build Kempas, his anonymous online community for college students in the United States.
Specifically, Kempus aims to create a repository of knowledge so that students can reach their ultimate goal: “upstream college degrees.” Its knowledge, or what its founders call a “unique dataset in higher education,” extends to professor ratings, tips for buying used textbooks, housing reviews, and even how to get on-campus counseling. range.
“We’re democratizing the level of access to information starting with course reviews,” says Lee.
Kempus, which was incorporated in August 2022, recently raised a $3 million seed round from Bithumb Korea, South Korea’s leading cryptocurrency exchange, but its founders said the company has no plans to partner with cryptocurrencies. says no.
According to Lee, the reason for raising money from Bithumb is that Kempus is fundamentally a data business. Blockchain under your portfolio. ”
autonomy
Reports continued to show that adolescents are particularly vulnerable to social media abuse. While ambitious startups like Fizz are pitching a “safe and private” social network for college students and sparking investor interest in the “next Facebook,” Kempus is leveraging student experience and knowledge. We have established a position as a “community” to utilize.
Users are anonymous, but their identities are verified by their school email and they can only participate in their own university community. To foster a safe environment, Kempus has created a self-control mechanism that allows students to flag bad guys. “We are not a mega social media company that can hire thousands of people in the Philippines to moderate content. [of filtering] It’s a community,” Lee says.
The second tier is Kempus itself, which rewards students with points for their content contributions. In doing so, the company aims to become a facilitator rather than a moderator or censor.
To attract early users, Kempus reaches out to student councils and faculty across the university. The company only launched its MVP (minimum viable product) in late January, so it’s still too early to tell if it’s found product market fit. Course reviews sound niche, but Lee believes that narrow focus is precisely the strategic advantage of startups.
“Multiple jabs have been taken to solve the problem of higher education as a whole…but it is a very difficult problem to solve, with multiple dimensions, multiple categories, deeply rooted in society and humanity. I think it has to do with politics,” he claims. “We’re not here to solve the higher education problem as a whole. We’re trying to focus bottom-up.”
