Sphero acquires a music education startup

ToysGuru 2018-06-26

It’s hard to say precisely how Sphero’s pivot to education is going in these early stages, but it lately got an infusion of funding and is already out acquiring new startups. The BB-8 maker announced this morning that it’s picked up Specdrums — the fellow Boulder, Co-based startup is a Kickstarter success narrative that lets users generate music with an app connected reverberate.

It’s a strange fit at first glance, but Sphero clearly determines the company’s wearable technology as a strong addition to its newfound STEAM education focus.

“We firmly believe that play is a powerful educator. With the addition of Specdrums, we are strengthening the’ A’ in STEAM in our product roadmap, ” Sphero CEO Paul Berberian said in a press release tied to the news. “With Sphero’s infrastructure and the cornerstone that the Specdrums founders have already completed, we believe there’s a huge opportunity to continue to inspire curiosity in classrooms and beyond.”

How Specdrums will fit into the larger corporation remains to be determined, but for now, Sphero is promising a relaunch of the company’s first music product the end of this year or the beginning of next. The initial Spedrums offering had been sold out after the closing of the company’s 2017 crowdfunding campaign.

Sphero, for my own part, kicked off the year on bumpy footing, laying off dozens of staffers after the company’s glut of Disney-branded robotics toys failed to maintain its earlier Star Wars success. At the time, the company promised to double down on education, and is looking to fulfill this objective with a recent $12 million funding round.

Terms for this particular acquisition, however, have not been disclosed.

Read more: https :// techcrunch.com/ 2018/06/ 22/ sphero-acquires-a-music-education-startup /~ ATAGEND

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