Participated · Series D · May 2020

PresenceLearning offers a proprietary online platform that connects speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists, and behavioral and mental health professionals with K-12 students. The company has delivered more than 2.5 million teletherapy sessions through its network of over 1,000 certified clinicians. Its services are used by hundreds of K-12 schools and districts across the U.S. PresenceLearning was founded in 2009 and is led by CEO Kate Eberle Walker. The company intends to use new funding to accelerate expansion of its online therapy and assessment services. The platform focuses on delivering remote special-education related services to school systems. PresenceLearning is a telehealth platform and marketplace that connects clinicians with K-12 students for live speech therapy, occupational therapy, behavioral and mental health services. Founded in 2009, the company operates a nationwide network of online professionals that includes hundreds of speech language pathologists, occupational therapists, special education teachers, and behavioral and mental health providers. PresenceLearning delivers live interactive video sessions with progress reporting and says it benefits tens of thousands of children every day. The company plans to continue growing within K-12 services while expanding into additional allied health fields and new user populations, including hospitals and other care settings. Its stated mission is to make online therapy practical, affordable, and convenient for broader patient populations. PresenceLearning provides K-12 schools with access to a nationwide network of qualified, fully licensed clinicians, including speech-language pathologists, counselors, and occupational therapists. Students access these professionals via live videoconferencing while parents and teachers receive reports and analytics on the child’s progress. Founded in 2009, the company has more than doubled its student base each of the past three years and recently completed its 200,000th live online therapy session. PresenceLearning reports that students served by its therapists consistently exceed national benchmarks for clinical progress, beating averages on common language goals by roughly 13 percentage points. The company positions its offering as a way to increase clinical efficiency and lower costs for schools, noting special education represents about 13% of students and 20% of K-12 spending—roughly 7 million students and at least $60 billion in annual spend. These product capabilities and metrics underscore the company’s traction within the special-education market.

Participated · Series C · Dec 2016

MasteryConnect builds an assessment and curriculum platform focused on supporting K-12 educators with formative assessment, interim-benchmark assessment, curriculum planning, and collaboration. The platform enables teachers to identify levels of student understanding in the moment through a variety of assessments so they can target students for immediate intervention and use data to evaluate their practice. The company reports serving over 2.5 million teachers and 21 million students around the world. Recent feature releases include mobile evidence capture for performance-based assessment, full support of the LTI integration standard, and the PRO version of the app Socrative. MasteryConnect announced a $4.5 million Series C financing from inside investors and said it is poised to achieve profitability in 2017, which it presented as ensuring long-lasting stability. Leadership stated the 2017 roadmap will strengthen the core assessment offering and add new features to better measure student growth and capture evidence of learning. MasteryConnect provides teachers with software to plan instruction and measure individualized student progress using formative assessments, qualitative feedback, test scores, and individual ratings. The platform lets educators track and rate student performance, assign targeted practice materials, and adjust teaching approaches based on where students are before and after instruction. It reports 1,800 paying customers, claims usage in 85% of U.S. school districts, and reaches 2 million teachers. The company currently has about 140 employees and intends to grow headcount with the new funding. Financially, MasteryConnect has raised a total of $29 million following the latest investment. The product focus remains on helping teachers tweak activities and approaches to improve student learning outcomes. MasteryConnect offers a mastery learning platform, curriculum, and formative assessment tools for K-12 educators to track student understanding against standards. The company’s technology is used in 85% of U.S. school districts, in more than 175 countries, reaching 21 million students and 1 million teachers. To meet demand it has more than doubled headcount from 35 to over 70 employees. MasteryConnect recently acquired Socrative for $5 million in cash and stock, adding intra-instruction assessment and classroom engagement features. The company emphasizes providing tools that help teachers personalize education at scale, with many tools offered for free. MasteryConnect is headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. MasteryConnect offers curriculum, assessment and mastery-learning tools that enable teachers to share standards-aligned assessments and resources and track student mastery of state and Common Core standards. The company has released features such as the Mastery Report Card and Resource Pins to help teachers find and share materials. It also launched a Next Generation Science Standards app in partnership with the National Science Teachers Association and its Common Core app is approaching one million downloads. MasteryConnect is a featured app partner with Microsoft Education. The platform is in use by a registered teacher in more than 36,000 K-12 schools across 10,000 districts, and teachers have tracked more than 18 million mastery scores. The company plans to use new funding to accelerate adoption of its mastery-learning tools in K-12 schools. MasteryConnect offers a cloud platform and mobile apps that let teachers create, share and automatically grade formative assessments tied to Common Core and state standards. The product includes a standards widget for embedding Common Core references, teacher collaboration tools, and browser and mobile grading. Its freemium business model provides free teacher accounts and paid premium plans ($159/year per teacher or $6/year per student for schools/districts) for advanced features and SIS integration. The company reports 500K iOS and Android app downloads, 40 million pageviews of standards in its reference apps, and usage in 7,700 districts and roughly 23,000 schools. With recent funding, MasteryConnect plans to scale infrastructure and support continued growth while maintaining focus on public and low-income schools.

Participated · Equity · Dec 2015

EdSurge is a Burlingame, California–based source of information and resources on edtech, founded in 2011 by CEO Betsy Corcoran. The company produces editorial content, runs conferences, operates a jobs board and offers a product called Edtech Concierge. Its mission is to connect educators with the most appropriate technology for their students and schools. As of this round the company had raised $5.6M in total funding. The new funds will be used to grow operations and to expand coverage beyond K–12 into higher education. Management and staff will continue to own the majority following the round. Edsurge is a Burlingame, CA-based independent provider of news, analysis and events focused on the education-technology community. The platform offers news, events and products for educators, helps developers understand educator and learner needs, and provides market insights for investors. Founded in 2011 and led by CEO Elizabeth Corcoran, the company has raised $2.86M to date. It recently added $960K to its Series A, bringing the round total to $2.46M. The company intends to use the funds to launch new initiatives. Backers include angel and venture investors such as Steve Blank, Catamount Ventures, Dale Dougherty and the Women's Venture Capital Fund. EdSurge provides news, analysis and events for the education-technology community, serving educators, entrepreneurs and investors. Its site aims to help educators discover products, developers understand what educators and learners need, and investors make sense of the edtech market. The company intends to use the Series A funds to organize live events across the US (EdSurge Summits), produce customized research reports for schools, edtech companies and investors, develop a nationwide hiring site, and continue growth in its mass-audience newsletters. EdSurge completed a $1.5M Series A financing led by GSV Capital. Founded in 2011 by Nick Punt, Elizabeth (Betsy) Corcoran and Agustin Vilaseca, the company is majority-owned by its employees and executives. It is based in Burlingame, California. Founded in February 2011 by veteran journalists, EdSurge operates a website and a popular weekly eNewsletter that aim to serve as a central hub for education-technology news and information. The site produces reporting, blogging and events to help educators, entrepreneurs and investors discover and evaluate edtech products. EdSurge emphasizes independent reviews and practical coverage to help schools sift through new products and adoption claims. The startup grew to a team of seven and counts tens of thousands of readers, reflecting early traction in the edtech community. As it moves forward, EdSurge plans to expand the breadth of its coverage and further develop independent reviews of edtech startups and products. Its editorial and product focus is intended to bridge a previously fragmented market and spur better product development by providing rigorous, usable information.

Participated · Series C · Oct 2015

Quri provides a retail intelligence platform that gives consumer brands visibility and insights into retail execution performance of products and promotions. Led by CEO Justin Behar, the platform captures data across 150,000 retail locations in 6,000 cities. Quri serves more than 200 global companies, including Procter & Gamble, Heineken, Unilever, Kraft, Nestlé, Johnson & Johnson and Tyson. The company raised $17M in a Series C and has raised $30M to date. Quri intends to use the funds to increase technology development and accelerate sales and service expansion across the U.S., including New York City, Chicago, Cincinnati, Denver, Minneapolis, Atlanta and Los Angeles. To support expansion, Quri hired David Gottlieb to lead Worldwide Sales & Customer Success and James Lamberti to lead Global Marketing. Quri provides retailer analytics and intelligence to CPG brands by dispatching a distributed mobile workforce via its consumer iPhone app, EasyShift, to collect in-store data and surface store-level problems in a dashboard. The company says its software has been adopted by half of the top 25 CPG brands (including Tyson, Nestle, Dannon, Procter & Gamble, and Unilever) and it works with over 25 manufacturers. Quri reports coverage of 99% of retailers’ presence in stores (up from 40% a year prior) and that 75%–80% of data is collected within 48 hours. Data quality checks are run before delivery to customers, and the product includes Quri Agile, a real-time alerting system to notify responsible parties when issues are flagged. Annual contracts are sold at enterprise price points (six- to seven-figure ARR), and the company says revenue has grown quarter over quarter and is tracking to 1,000% growth year over year. Quri is San Francisco–based, was founded in late 2010, currently has a 27-person team and plans to expand headcount and product development (including third-party integrations and an Android app).

Participated · Equity · May 2014

Ecologic Brands manufactures recycled-paper bottles, including its eco.bottle line, using material made from recycled cardboard. The company aims to reduce the waste and environmental impact associated with traditional bottles. It built a manufacturing facility in Manteca, California last year and plans to use new proceeds to scale current manufacturing capabilities. Customers include Seventh Generation, Safeway and Bodylogix. Founded in 2008 by Julie Corbett and led by CEO Ira Maroofian, the company is based in Oakland, California.