Imbellus Assessments: Out of the Gate with $23M and McKinsey & Co. as Client
On January 11, 2019, Mark Bauerlein of the James B. Martin Center posted a piece entitled, “Be Wary of This Test,” about a testing startup, Imbellus, which has an impressive website deficient in any substance. Even so, Imbellus already has $23M in venture capital funding behind it.
According to Bloomberg, Imbellus was incorporated in 2015.
Imbellus is also on Twitter, with the last posting in June 2017.
The founder of Imbellus, 26-year-old Harvard dropout, Rebecca Kantar, is featured as one of Forbes’ “30 Under 30 2019 startups with $15 million plus in funding.”
What Kantar purports to do is create a cognitive assessment to rival– and apparently replace– the likes of the SAT and ACT. From Kantar’s Imbellus site:
Imbellus is reinventing how we measure human potential.We build simulation-based assessments to evaluate how people think, not just what they know.For nearly 100 years, college admissions tests have shaped our entire education system.By rewriting this one line of code, we change the way the whole system operates.
Of course, Kantar cannot “rewrite the code” for ditching college admissions testing altogether; such rewriting would kill the market for her proposed product. No, she must keep the 100-years-of-college-admissions-testing market (for she hopes to make it her market) and simply offer a new and improved product.
But that product has yet to appear, even in fledgling form, for public inspection CONTINUE READING: Imbellus Assessments: Out of the Gate with $23M and McKinsey & Co. as Client | deutsch29
