TeachStreet Inc., a Seattle-based online marketplace for teaching and coaching services, has raised $2.25 million in Series A funding

What Company Is Offering:
Their goal is to encourage life-long learning by connecting inquiring minds with inspiring instructors via an insanely easy-to-use website. They’re creating an effortless way for curious folks to find great local instructors (whether they want to learn photography or square dancing!), and for teachers to find motivated students.

They hope that by making it easy to connect learners and teachers, in their own small way they can help build stronger communities and contribute to smarter and more interesting humans out there in the world.

How Much They Got From VCs:

TeachStreet Inc., a Seattle-based online marketplace for teaching and coaching services, has raised $2.25 million in Series A funding led by Madrona Venture Group, according to a regulatory filing.

Who Is Backing Them:
Dave Schappell | President & CEO

Dave focuses on developing the product vision, building the team and making TeachStreet an inspirational place to accomplish great things.

Dave developed his experience creating customer-focused marketplace initiatives at Amazon, JibJab and Unitus. He has deep experience in online marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), affiliate marketing, and high-impact public relations– yes, he spends a LOT of time online. As a Director at Amazon.com from '98-'04, he was a driving force in the emergence of the marketplace platform (used and new product sales by third-party merchants) that grew from 0% to more than 24% of Amazon’s unit sales today.

Prior to joining Amazon, Dave was a CPA and consultant with Arthur Andersen LLP. Dave attended the MBA program at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and has a BS from the Pennsylvania State University.

2.Fred Sadaghiani | Chief Technology Officer

Fred manages the team of mad technical geniuses building the TeachStreet experience.

Fred has extensive experience building large-scale, consumer-facing web applications at both Zillow (where he was Product Team Lead) and Amazon (where he was a software engineer). In addition to his experiences building user-friendly Web 2.0 products, his background includes years of experience developing real-time marketplace systems, including services and applications for information retrieval, knowledge representation and data mining.

Fred (barely) graduated from the University of Toronto with a BS in Computer Science and Mathematics.

More at:http://www.teachstreet.com/