Kno, a Santa Clara startup in the digital textbook market, has won $46 million in equity and debt financing in a round led by Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
“We are strong believers in the disruption of untapped markets, and education is a prime example of a sector in need of digital innovation,” Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz and a member of Kno’s board of directors, said in a statement Wednesday.
Kno is developing a fold-out tablet device with two touch-screen displays. The startup was founded in 2009 by Osman Rashid, a co-founder of Santa Clara online textbook rental pioneer Chegg, and Babur Habib, who previously worked as a chip designer at Intel and Phillips Semiconductors.
“We plan to use the infusion of capital to get the Kno into the hands of students for beta testing this fall and ultimately for the first customer ship later this year,” Habib, Kno’s chief technology officer, said in the news release.
In the statement, Kno cited a report from Simba Information, a publishing industry researcher, forecasting that e-books would account for 11 percent of the textbook market by 2013.
Silicon Valley Bank and TriplePoint Capital also participated in this round of funding. Other Kno investors include First Round Capital, Floodgate, Ron Conway and TriplePoint Capital.
According to TechCrunch, the latest funding round for Kno brings total investment in the startup to $55.4 million.
Kno faces competition from large players such as Amazon.com, which sells digital textbooks for its Kindle and other devices, and startups such as Inkling, a San Francisco company that last month released a textbook app for Apple’s iPad.
Contact Frank Russell at 408-920-5876.
