Participated · Series A · Jun 2019

ReUp Education partners with universities and community colleges to find, engage, and re-enroll the estimated 36 million Americans who stopped out of college without receiving a degree. The company combines a personalized, tech-driven platform with a diverse team of coaches to help learners return to school; it has engaged more than 150,000 stop-out students and re-enrolled over 16,000. ReUp also aims to serve the roughly 50 percent of adults who need reskilling or additional education to improve economic security or career prospects. With new investment, ReUp plans to expand its products, services, team of coaches, and academic program options to serve adult learners at all stages of past enrollment. The company’s go-forward strategy focuses on removing obstacles to starting or restarting education, delivering personalized experiences aligned to life and work goals, and improving long-term career and educational outcomes. Terah Crews will join as CEO to support this next phase while co-founder Sarah Horn moves into the role of Chief Impact Officer. ReUp Education leverages data, technology, and professional coaching to re-enroll students who have left college and support them through to degree completion. It partners with universities and community colleges to find, engage, and empower stopout and adult learners. The company’s platform includes an Engagement Engine and predictive analytics built on more than 10 million data points, plus NLP and machine-learning tools to monitor coaching quality. ReUp pairs those tools with teams of Success Coaches using a proprietary coaching model; forty percent of coaches are people of color, fifty-five percent are first-generation graduates, and forty-five percent are former stop-outs. Since 2015 the company has helped bring back over 8,000 students, more than 400 re-enrolled students have graduated, and it has recaptured over $18 million in tuition revenue for partners in the past two years. ReUp reports a network of more than thirty partner colleges and says it has helped colleges generate more than $25.8 million in new revenue.

Participated · Series A · Jun 2018

LendStreet provides technology-based solutions and resources to help consumers in financial distress reduce debt, increase credit scores, and improve savings. Led by Founder and CEO Jerry Nemorin, the company works with financial organizations to negotiate discounts with creditors and then restructures debts as loans with lower, fixed, affordable payments. Since inception LendStreet says it has helped customers reduce their debt by nearly 40% and improve credit scores by an average of 100 points. The company closed a $7M Series A equity round and secured $110M in debt financing to scale the platform. LendStreet intends to use the funds to expand reach and serve more consumers in need of debt restructuring and consolidation.

Led · Series A · Apr 2018

Allovue builds education finance tools and services to help K-12 school districts and state education departments budget, track spending, and allocate resources. Its flagship product, Balance, is an online platform that integrates with existing accounting systems to enable collaborative staffing and spending plans, view account balances, track expenditures, and connect budgets to performance metrics. The company supports budgeting approaches including zero-based budgeting, weighted-student funding, and priority-based budgeting, and emphasizes real-time collaboration and data quality control. Allovue has helped districts uncover unspent grants and accounting errors, reallocate millions of dollars, and redistribute hundreds of millions to the school level to increase principal autonomy and resource equity. The company serves systems covering over one million K-12 public school students and offers supplemental services such as funding equity analysis, diagnostic surveys, and financial management training. Founded in 2013 and based in Baltimore, Allovue has 25 employees and has raised a total of $13 million to date. Allovue builds budgeting and finance software for school districts, including its Balance product. The company has focused on district budgeting since releasing a dedicated budget module for Balance in 2017. It plans to expand product offerings related to ESSA finance regulations and will use new funding for those product efforts as well as general growth and expansion. Allovue raised bridge financing to capitalize on short-term opportunities and high customer demand driven by the regulatory environment. The company is considering a larger Series B as part of its long-term growth strategy. Allovue provides K-12 public school districts with Balance, a financial analysis platform that consolidates budgets, vendor transactions, general ledger balances and other accounting data into a single dashboard. The platform also enables district leaders to analyze spending alongside non-financial metrics such as attendance, student achievement and demographics. Clients named in the article include New Haven Public Schools, Indianapolis Public Schools, Pueblo District 70 and Santa Ana Unified School District. The company recently partnered with Pivot Learning Partners as part of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Smarter School Spending initiative to assist districts with LCFF and LCAP allocations. Led by CEO Jess Gartner, Allovue intends to use the new funds to expand its customer success and leadership teams and accelerate product development. The company reported having 10 employees and plans to add 35 people in 2016 while expanding nationally with new offices in Denver and the Bay Area. Allovue builds Balance, a software product that connects with K-12 school financial systems to allow administrators and other school employees to track financial information daily. The platform surfaces finances alongside education performance indicators such as test scores and attendance, enabling decision-making that weighs spending against outcomes. Balance is being piloted in Baltimore city schools and New Haven Public Schools. Allovue is rolling out a diagnostic and training program to help principals manage their own budgets. The company says it will use new funding to expand its reach and add additional features to the platform. CEO and founder Jess Gartner framed the work as giving school leaders the tools and training to make better spending decisions for students. Allovue builds education resource planning and analytics software that lets district officials, principals and school administrators visualize, analyze and optimize the impact of spending on educational outcomes. Its flagship product, Balance: The Education Finance Suite, contains applications to analyze school budgets, track and forecast expenditures, identify trends over time and plan for future capital investments. The company is led by CEO and founder Jess Gartner. Allovue closed an $800k seed funding to support product development. The funds are intended to launch a district-level product and to enhance the school version in 2014. The company graduated from the 2013 AccelerateBaltimore cohort run by the Emerging Technology Center and the Abell Foundation.

Participated · Series A · Mar 2017

HowGood offers Latis, a SaaS sustainability intelligence platform that delivers ingredient- and product-level impact analysis for food companies. The platform draws from over 550 independent data sources and certifications to provide UPC-level impact data on more than two million products and instant analysis for over 33,000 ingredients, chemicals and materials. Customers can view metrics across environmental impact, labor risk and animal welfare, track portfolio-level footprints such as annual carbon and water usage, and benchmark against industry standards. HowGood was founded in 2007 and initially focused on rating grocery products before expanding to business units and building Latis. The company says annual revenue doubled in the past year and counts five of the 10 largest CPGs, including Danone North America, among its customers. HowGood plans to expand industry partnerships in the U.S. and Europe, grow its team, add supplier-specific data and new metrics (including regenerative agriculture metrics and EU Eco-Score/Nutri-Score), and venture beyond the food vertical. HowGood is an NYC-based SaaS data platform that maintains a sustainability database for the food and personal care industries. Its core product, Latis, is a sustainability intelligence platform that delivers instant, ingredient-level sustainability insights to CPGs, restaurants and retailers. Latis lets brands assess impacts across environmental and social metrics such as greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity, labor risk and animal welfare, and accelerates product innovation. The company is led by founder and CEO Alexander Gillett. Customers include the majority of brands within Danone North America. HowGood plans to use new funding to accelerate platform development and expand the product into new verticals such as health & beauty and textiles. HowGood provides ratings on food, personal care and other household products, assessing environmental, health and trade impacts and presenting scores via in-store signage, its website and mobile apps. Shoppers can scan a product barcode in the mobile app to obtain a rating. The company has analyzed roughly 200,000 products using proprietary data plus a wide range of government and third-party sources to evaluate sourcing, chemicals, processing, packaging, shipping and labor practices. Retailers and brands license HowGood’s data to display scores in stores or to benchmark their merchandise privately. HowGood plans to expand coverage to a wider range of products (cosmetics and grooming are underway), sign on more retailers and grocers, and invest in technical R&D. It is also exploring new delivery channels such as wearables, health apps, enhanced in-store displays and voice platforms like Google Home and Amazon Echo. HowGood develops a multi‑indicator rating system and mobile apps that help shoppers evaluate foods for sustainability, humane treatment, fair wages, local production and other social and environmental factors. The company has rated over 100,000 products and uses a simple one-to-three globe score to communicate goodness to consumers. It licenses its data to smaller grocers in 21 U.S. states and says stores that promote top-rated products have seen a 27% sales lift for those items. HowGood’s rating framework covers more than 60 benchmark indicators, including ingredients, manufacturing, worker treatment, carbon emissions and hazardous waste. The company declined to provide specifics about its own sales or revenue, and its 16-person team is now growing following new financing. HowGood plans to expand its in-store ratings system to larger grocery chains while promoting its newly released iOS and Android apps.

Participated · Series A · Aug 2016

Viridis Learning is a New York–based SaaS technology company whose proprietary platform uses data analytics to match students, colleges and employers through competency-based skill validation. The platform enables colleges to track student performance and outcomes, reduce time-to-completion, and improve employment placement. Employers can hire more quickly, cut recruitment and retention costs, and reduce churn by using skill-based job matching. Early adopters include Mesa Community College, Cerritos Community College, Dallas County Community College District, Hawaii Community Colleges, Long Beach City College, Onogonda Community College-SUNY, San Jose City College and the Louisiana Workforce Commission. Management says the company plans to scale the platform nationally to become a singular hub connecting students, colleges and employers and to help close the global skills gap. Founder and CEO Felix W. Ortiz III leads the company. Viridis is an online education technology platform focused on training and placing the middle-skill workforce. The company provides a human capital technology solution that offers training leading to industry-recognized credentials and job placement. Its system captures data to match job seekers to employers by industry sector, location and skill. Viridis counts early adopters including YouthBuild USA, STRIVE and the City University of New York. The company is led by founder Felix W. Ortiz, III. The reported funding amount from the announced round was undisclosed.