• ClassWallet

  Participated · Seed · Jul 2015

  ClassWallet’s patented digital wallet technology enables state agencies and school districts to disburse public funds quickly and compliantly while automating the purchasing and reimbursement lifecycle. The platform is used across 32 states and helps clients realize the full potential of over $2.7 billion in public funds. ClassWallet operates an integrated marketplace of retailers and service providers, including Amazon, Best Buy, Home Depot, Michaels, Office Depot, Scholastic, Staples and Varsity Tutors. Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Hollywood, Florida, the company says it reduces the time and cost of existing solutions while ensuring compliance and mitigating potential fraud. ClassWallet has been recognized on the Inc. 5000 and Deloitte Technology Fast 500 lists for its rapid growth. The recent $95 million institutional growth capital investment is intended to support continued expansion and efforts to reshape how state and local government agencies do business. ClassWallet is a Hollywood, Fla.-based fintech led by founder and CEO Jamie Rosenberg that provides school districts with a spend management platform that reconciles and pays for transactions in a cashless, paperless and automated manner. Its software streamlines manual tasks such as collecting receipts, reconciling invoices and statements, making vendor and reimbursement payments, and performing data entry required to meet annual audit requirements. The company is used in over 2,000 schools across 15 states. ClassWallet raised $2.3M in the reported round and has raised over $7M to date. It intends to use the new funds to expand product offerings and add to its business development and support staff. ClassWallet provides an end-to-end digital solution to disburse, track and manage school system funds, combining funds disbursement, e-commerce, a reloadable debit card and tracking in an integrated platform. The company is used in over 850 schools and is working with large districts including Los Angeles Unified and Polk County; it is also gaining traction with university athletic departments and states for education savings account management. ClassWallet says it reduces transaction costs that historically reached about 40% to less than 5% and shortens the fund-spend-track lifecycle from weeks to same day. The company planned a platform release in January 2017 that includes a solution to allow schools to accept cash payments from parents without bringing cash into school buildings or classrooms, and several districts are already working to implement that solution. In partnership with Brentwood Associates, ClassWallet will accelerate its product roadmap and invest in sales and marketing to expand distribution. ClassWallet operates a platform that enables school systems and related organizations to disburse and track funds. The platform is used by groups and districts including Harrington Park School District, Albuquerque Public Schools Education Foundation, Reading is Fundamental and Broward Education Foundation. More than 40 retailers, including Amazon, Office Depot, Best Buy, School Specialty and Scholastic, accept ClassWallet as a form of payment. The company plans to release a new version of its platform this summer that will add a reloadable debit card and an API for vendor integration. ClassWallet has raised a total of $2.53M and intends to use new proceeds to accelerate sales and advance its product roadmap. The company is led by founder and CEO Jamie Rosenberg and is based in Miami.

• ExecOnline

  Participated · Series A · Oct 2014

  ExecOnline delivers applied-learning leadership development programs to enterprise clients via a proprietary online platform and partnerships with elite business schools. The company reports participant completion rates above 90%, strong NPS scores, and measurable ROI for clients. Its platform combines on-campus engagement dynamics with scalable online delivery to serve corporate executives. ExecOnline has delivered transformational learning experiences to leaders at over 500 global organizations since 2012. The company plans to invest in sales and marketing, expand its content Experience Library, and enhance its technology platform to accelerate growth. ExecOnline develops and delivers enterprise leadership development programs combining in-person training with online learning, covering strategy, innovation and change, leadership, and operations and finance. Its portfolio includes proprietary offerings and programs run with elite schools such as Berkeley, Columbia, IMD, MIT, Wharton, and Yale. The company has delivered leadership development experiences to more than 250 organizations and 12,000 business leaders, with customers including over 250 corporations, mainly in the Fortune 1000. Founded in 2012 and led by CEO Stephen Bailey, ExecOnline operates from New York City. The company plans to use new funding to further develop proprietary L&D program offerings and to increase sales and marketing efforts. ExecOnline is a NYC-based provider of online leadership development programs that partners with business schools including Berkeley-Haas, Columbia, IMD, MIT-Sloan, Wharton, and Yale. Its university-certified programs cover leadership, strategy, innovation, and operations and combine on-demand video lectures, self-paced application exercises, and live online collaboration with faculty and a global community. Founded in 2012 by CEO Stephen Bailey, the company has delivered leadership development experiences to more than 150 organizations and 7,000 business leaders. ExecOnline intends to use the Series B proceeds to extend sales and marketing capabilities and to grow its suite of enterprise-focused online leadership development offerings. The company works with enterprise clients to tailor dynamic content to corporate objectives and focuses on measurable organizational impact. ExecOnline delivers school-certified online executive education programs in partnership with elite business schools such as MIT Sloan, Columbia Business School and Berkeley‑Haas. Its core product is a proprietary enterprise learning platform featuring on-demand HD video lectures, self-paced application exercises, and live video collaboration with professors and executive peers. The company powers programs that are school-certified and delivered to corporate cohorts. Over 1,000 executives from approximately 70 companies were committed to attending programs with UC Berkeley‑Haas and Columbia, and nearly 400 executives from 35 countries participated in Fall 2014 programs. Led by founder and CEO Stephen Bailey, ExecOnline plans to use new funding to improve offerings, enrich its platform, establish additional business‑school partnerships, expand sales and marketing, and scale operations. ExecOnline offers an end-to-end online executive training platform that partners with top 10 business schools to deliver branded curriculum and interaction with business school professors. The service lets executives complete training from their desks without traveling to campus. It targets Fortune 500 companies that typically send executives to immersive programs at schools like Harvard. Founder Stephen Bailey says the product solves the staffing crunch companies face when executives are away for extended on-campus programs. The startup raised $800,000 in seed funding from The Washington Post and has two companies signed up so far. ExecOnline is slated to go live in January and does not yet have a website; competitors mentioned include degree-focused providers like 2U and platform providers like Moodle.

• Newsela

  Participated · Seed · Oct 2013

  Newsela curates a range of third-party content—primary source documents, news and magazine pieces like National Geographic—into K-12 instructional materials intended to replace textbooks and provide more engaging, personalized lessons. Its product bundles content with analytics to help teachers track and boost student engagement, a capability that grew in importance during remote learning. The paid product is priced between $6 and $14 per student, contrasted with textbook costs of $20 to $40 per student. Newsela estimates gross bookings grew 115% over the pandemic and revenue grew 81%; the company declined to disclose exact revenue figures or whether it is profitable. By the end of 2021 the platform expected more than 11 million students using Newsela licensing, and estimates two-thirds of U.S. public schools use the platform. The company offered its product for free early in the pandemic, which drove a healthy bump in users, and plans to use new funding to expand distribution into more classrooms. Newsela offers a platform that aggregates licensed third‑party content from over 100 sources, republishes it on its site, and rewrites material into five reading levels to make texts adaptive for classrooms. It primarily serves K‑12 users across subjects including social studies, science, English, and some math, and also supports ESL and adult education. The company reports more than 20 million students and 1.8 million teachers using the platform, with usage in roughly 90% of U.S. schools. Newsela provides a free tier plus two paid tiers for teachers and for schools/districts offering additional analytics, admin tools, training, and support. The startup works with teachers and districts to build customized collections on request and aims to expand subject coverage and deeper penetration in existing accounts. Newsela says it is capital‑efficient, has grown staff 50% in the last year, and expects similar growth, positioning itself for further product expansion and potential M&A. Newsela publishes daily news articles from media sources at five reading levels to engage students in grades 2–12. It sources content from outlets such as the Associated Press, Washington Post, Tribune News Service and Scientific American. Students read articles and take Common Core-aligned quizzes online to build nonfiction literacy skills. Led by founder and CEO Matthew Gross, the platform reports more than 400,000 teachers who have assigned over 57 million articles. The company plans to use new funding to accelerate its machine learning capabilities and expand its presence. Launched in 2013 by CEO Matthew Gross, Newsela publishes daily news articles at five reading levels to engage students in grades 3–12 across topics such as immigration, diplomacy, drones and animal extinction. The platform provides teachers with tools to instruct reading across a range of abilities and subject areas. Since launch, Newsela articles have been read more than 5 million times by students from more than 80 countries. The company intends to use its new funding to expand content coverage into areas such as sports and science, produce curriculum materials for teachers and schools, and add features for richer feedback to students. Newsela also plans to analyze students’ and teachers’ use of the platform to develop more effective learning tools. Financially, Newsela raised $4.1M in a Series A to support these product and content expansions. Newsela is an NYC-based online platform that publishes daily news articles from top news sources rewritten at five different reading levels for grades 3 through 12. The platform adapts content to each student’s reading ability and interests so learners receive appropriately challenging material. Articles are paired with quizzes aligned to the Common Core State Standards so teachers can track students’ progress daily. Teachers receive customized insights and recommended actions to improve specific students’ reading comprehension. The company plans to use the $1.2M seed funding to expand its offering of daily articles at multiple reading levels and Common Core-aligned quizzes. Newsela Beta is available for free, the company is hiring, and it is led by founder and CEO Matthew Gross.

• Treehouse

  Led · Series B · Apr 2013

  Treehouse is an online education platform that offers video lessons, a realtime practice engine, quizzes, project-based learning and gamification to teach coding and design for iOS, Android and the web. The company charges students between $29 and $49 for access to its content and reached profitability quickly. By September it had more than 12,000 paying students and its user base has since grown to over 25,000 active students. Treehouse launched in late 2011 and is led by founder and CEO Ryan Carson. The startup has run programs targeting college students (a 5,000-account scholarship program worth about $3M in waived fees) and is launching a six-month high school pilot priced at $9/month per student to train seniors for engineering jobs without a university degree. Treehouse emphasizes a full-time professional teaching staff and live, in-browser coding to differentiate from crowdsourced and purely video-based competitors. Treehouse offers a video-driven platform with example videos, online quizzes and badges to teach people how to build websites, web apps and iPhone apps. It films its video lessons at an expanded studio in Orlando and maintains primary offices in Portland, Oregon. Founded in November 2011, the company has a 34-person team and is operating at a $3 million revenue run rate and is "growing fast." Management plans to hire at least 10–15 more people and identifies hiring qualified on-camera teachers as a key challenge. Treehouse currently sells subscriptions and intends to use new capital to expand content, rapidly iterate on product features, and experiment with revenue models. Treehouse is a developer education startup that delivers expert-curated web design, development and iOS courses via videos, quizzes and in-browser code challenges. The platform uses badges earned for quiz streaks and challenge completion to build public member profiles and help employers identify qualified candidates. Treehouse charges users $29 to $49 per month and is already profitable. The company has corporate customers such as Estée Lauder, Disney and Virgin for employee training, and startups including LivingSocial, Automattic (WordPress) and BankSimple use it to recruit members. Co-founder Ryan Carson said the service aims to move people into higher-paying design and development jobs and to expand its curriculum with additional courses like iOS 5 Foundations, Ruby Foundations and PHP Foundations. Treehouse recently closed a $600,000 seed round to support its public launch and growth.

• ProtonMedia

  Led · Series B · Jun 2011

  ProtonMedia develops ProtoSphere, a virtual world and collaboration tool that enables enterprise users to work together in a 3D environment on spreadsheets, documents, images, presentations and web content. The software is positioned as a blend of Second Life–style virtual worlds and enterprise collaboration platforms like Yammer or Jive. The company plans to integrate ProtoSphere with Kaplan’s ComplianceWire learning management system as part of its strategic partnership with Kaplan. Kaplan will also act as a strategic reseller of ProtonMedia products to its customers. ProtonMedia intends to use new capital for product development, sales and marketing and to support the Kaplan integration. The company faces competitors including Linden Lab.

No current team members are available.