Tutor.id Offers A Marketplace For Tutors And Students

The mission to “professionalize” and empower tutors to launch and manage their own tutoring businesses using a proprietary framework for “better student progress tracking” led the 33-year-old Karen V. Ordones, of São Paulo, Brazil, to launch Tutor.id in 2015. Based in Estonia, the company’s name extension of “.id”–short for “identification”–was added after a discussion with their first angel investor and business advisor and justifies what Tutor.id provides tutors– “their own community and business.”

The worldwide e-learning market is to be worth $325 Billion in 2025. And Estonia, with a mere 1.3 million population, stands as one of the world’s most technologically advanced countries since the 1990s ‘e-Estonia’ movement launched by the Estonian Government transformed the country into a digital society.

“We launched a marketplace to connect tutors and students and today we have a holistic connecting solution, while providing tutors with the tools to gain tangible progress, and learning,” says Ordones whose 20-member team based in Brazil will soon increase as Tutor.id scales across Brazil and India–two of the largest markets with distinct needs and challenges–where she hopes to impact in the “best possible way.”

Ordones’ co-founders, Murillo Ichikawa a full-stack developer, and Stefanie Trotta, former Google and LinkedIn executive, who oversees the company’s marketing, are focused on the company’s expansion.

Tutor.id has 5,985 tutors from across 113 countries including those from Harvard, NYU, MIT, Kings College and such top Estonian Universities as the University of Tartu, Tallinn, and TalTech – Tallinn University of Technology. With some 16,381 course bookings, over 15,000 hours of lessons taught, Tutor.id enjoys a 98% user satisfaction with 100% 5-star reviews. 

Since 2015, Tutor.id has raised $1 million from angel funders across Estonia, Colombia, Denmark, and America. Now, a cohort in BAJ Accelerator–a collaboration between New York-based Baltic American Chamber of Commerce (BACC) promoting advancement and guidance of business relations between the U.S. and the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), Orion Worldwide Innovations LLC and Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech–Ordones says it’s been “extremely helpful to fine-tune” the business pitch and get “confidence boost to fundraise successfully.” The company is now seeking $1 million in funding–at $7 million pre-money valuation–to expand its product roadmap while its partners help scale the platform in Brazil and India.

Emma Arakelyan, CEO & Founder of Orion Worldwide Innovations, LLC, considers Tutor.id a perfect candidate as a cohort based on their ideal growth phase, focus on the U.S. market and scaling.

Fully Vetted And Trusted Tutors

While Tutors are “coming organically” to the platform, at the start, Ordones marketed and recruited tutors to the platform from online teachers’ communities, including LinkedIn and Facebook.

“We had zero marketing costs in tutor acquisition,” Ordones says the platform currently has 2,560 registered students of all ages, who opt to pay for a single lesson, or a package of lessons to be used within a pre-established time frame. A parent or a legal guardian is required to register underaged students.

Tutors are initially vetted through a semi-automated process inside the Tutor.id platform before a manual verification. This follows brief interviews by the Tutor.id team of experts. Ordones plans on solidifying the platform’s quality and trust by conducting Anti-money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) verifications to guarantee the “tutors are who they say they are.” This will also up the ante as another step towards “quality and market differentiator.”

The platform has nearly 400 Tutor.id team-approved subjects ranging from school subjects of various national curriculums to soft skills or “unusual subjects as Canine Behavior, Neurocognitive Development and Podcasting for Beginners,” says Ordones. While registering on Tutor.id platform is free, the over 2,500 registered students on the platform only pay for purchased lessons. Tutor.id keeps a 15% fee per lessons or package of lessons booked. It offers tutors a $10 monthly Lite Plan or $40 Premium Plan subscriptions.

Using Machine Learning (tutoring 3.0) to match students’ needs with the appropriate tutor, Tutor.id’s platform allows “tutors to launch and manage their own business and monitor students’ learning progress,” explains Ordones. Tutors can offer students higher customization of their tutoring sites or use the subscription service option to onboard their own users to the platform. The platform also offers customized features for tutors wanting to move their existing business and students to Tutor.id.

Lessons are delivered inside of the Tutor.id platform, with an integration with Whereby, a Norwegian-based videocall service company, that enables white board, notes and collaboration during the class between tutor and student. While currently all payments are processed via Stripe, Tutor.id will soon implement Airwallex wallet system to accommodate local payment methods as the company scales to additional markets.