Student education start-up bought by US tech firm

BlikBook is an app that connects students and lecturers around course content, delivering improved student engagement and learning outcomes.

Using intelligent notifications system, it helps students understand what content their peers are engaging with, while its learning algorithm helps to deliver the most relevant content to them and enable lecturers to drive and understand student behaviour.

Ben Hall, a PhD student in UCL Computer Science, and Cheyne Tan, an MBA student at LBS, co-founded it in 2010 with two other LBS students, Barnaby Voss and Deepak Colluru.

Ben explains how the idea for the app came from their own experiences. "We realised that a standard way to solve questions was to first ask one of your classmates and that there was often consistency across the class in the areas and problems that individuals needed help with.

"We also realised the nature of these questions often meant that when they eventually did reach the lecturers, they were often fielding the same question over and over again."

"Our thesis," says Cheyne, "was that there had to be a more efficient way to share information amongst peers and between faculty and the student body - which is why BlikBook was built."

Now used across one third of UK universities and in many institutions across Europe, North America and Asia, Blikbook attracted the attention of Civitas Learning - a cloud-based, predictive analytics platform based in Austin, Texas - and, last month, the US company acquired Blikbook.

Cheyne remains onboard at Blikbook, while Ben has now moved to the US to run another startup, but they both remember the help that they received when they were starting out.

"I'm super proud of our UCL and wider University of London roots, says Cheyne. "UCL has been instrumental in our journey," agrees Ben. "The Management Science and Innovation department were the first to use BlikBook and have been huge supporters to this day."

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• Ben Hall (left) and Cheyne Tan (centre).