Reid Hoffman and Matt Cohler Team Up to Give Edmodo $15M

Edmodo, which helps K-12 teachers and schools create private social networks for their classrooms, has raised $15 million in a round led by Greylock Partners’ Reid Hoffman and Benchmark Capital’s Matt Cohler.

The San Mateo, Calif.-based Edmodo has one of those growth curves that grab investors’ attention. It’s now at five million users, up from 500,000 a year ago.

Edmodo supports a range of classroom-specific activity, from internal message boards to online quizzes and grading, both on the Web and mobile devices. The Edmodo interface looks a lot like Facebook — or especially an enterprise collaboration tool like Yammer.

At the moment the service is completely free. Edmodo Chairman Rob Hutter told AllThingsD the company doesn’t have any immediate plans to bring in revenue. The VC funding is meant to fuel continued growth and hiring.

This is the first joint investment for Hoffman and Cohler, who are both newly minted hotshot venture capital partners, and who previously worked together at LinkedIn and in some capacity at Facebook (where Hoffman was an early investor and Cohler was an early employee). Other Edmodo investors include Union Square Ventures and Learn Capital.