Hungary's Prezi infiltrates White House, joins ConnectED Initiative alongside Apple, Adobe and co

Today, Hungarian-American presentation technology startup Prezi is announcing that it is one of the latest companies to join the White House ConnectED Initiative, a plan aimed at getting high-speed Internet connectivity and educational technology into classrooms and into the hands of teachers across the United States.

Prezi thus becomes the first European company to partner with the White House on the initiative, committing $100 million in Edu Pro licenses to high schools and educators all across America.

Other companies that have responded to U.S. President Barack Obama's call to improve education throughout the United States include Apple, Microsoft, Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, Autodesk, and O'Reilly Media.

The above partners have committed over $750 million to the initiative to date.

Prezi's involvement, along with new partner Adobe, bringing the total ConnectED investment from the private sector to more than $1 billion.

Concretely, Prezi wants to enable teachers to help their students explore subjects, see how ideas are related, and collaborate with each other with its software suite, which has always catered well to educators (hence the existence of a special license for use in classrooms).

Peter Arvai, co-founder and CEO of Prezi, comments:

“Better education is our best chance to improve the world. Through the President’s ConnectED initiative, we’re making sure that more schools have access to the innovative tools that will inspire an expanding mind.

Prezi, in particular, will help teachers convey ideas and enable students to understand and retain concepts. We are extremely excited to participate in the initiative and grateful to the nearly 40 million people in our Prezi community who have made it possible.” Indeed, more than 40 million people from over 190 countries already use Prezi to create visually compelling presentations, from their desktops and mobile devices.

The company was founded in Budapest back in 2009, and has come a hell of a way after I first wrote about them on TechCrunch in April of that year.

All images courtesy of Prezi.