News

PackBack Raises Another $1.5 Million

June 9, 2015 By Alida Miranda-Wolff

Featured on Crain’s Chicago Business

Digital textbook rental startup Packback has raised $1.5 million in fresh capital to expand its reach and offer a new product aimed at professors and students.

The new investment was led by Hyde Park Angels and included Wintrust Ventures, a unit of Wintrust Bank recently established to make startup investments. Packback is Wintrust Ventures’ first startup investment. Previous investors Mark Cuban and Howard Tullman also participated.

Packback, which got its start four years ago at Illinois State University, allows students to rent digital versions of textbooks for as little as $5 a day.

It’s in use on more than 70 campuses across the country, said Packback CEO Mike Shannon. The company has seven employees and is likely to double headcount over the next year.

The new funding will help the company accelerate the launch of Packback Answers, a software platform that allows students to ask questions of professors and other students.

Packback hopes it will lead to more rapid adoption of digital textbooks, which is currently less than 10 percent of books used in the classroom. But e-books are just one part of what it sees as the real opportunity: an ongoing digital platform between students and professors.

“This product is the result of hundreds of conversations in which professors voiced their challenges of repetitively answering the same questions over and over again in office hours and finding it difficult to drive meaningful discussion between students in and out of the classroom,” said Packback co-founder Jessica Tenuta.

Packback Answers has been in beta testing with a few classes at Chicago’s DePaul University and elsewhere. The company hasn’t yet said what the business model will be for the software platform.