Reportwell · Co-Founder & CEO
Jacob
Jacob
Allen
He drowned in school paperwork once. Now he builds the boat for everyone else.
Levity is a company value. Even the founder photos play along.
He drowned in school paperwork once. Now he builds the boat for everyone else.
Somewhere in Indianapolis, a charter school principal stares at another state form. Attendance records. Grant spending, accounted for line by line. A compliance deadline that does not care how good the teaching was that week. Jacob Allen spent years on the wrong side of that desk - and instead of cursing the paperwork, he wrote down its name and built a company to bury it.
That company is Reportwell. It takes the slow, dread-soaked ritual of regulatory compliance reporting and turns it into a clean, AI-assisted portal that schools, districts, and the agencies above them can actually stand to look at. Allen co-founded it in 2023 with four colleagues who had all felt the same ache. In 2024 they closed a $1.1M pre-seed round and shipped the product into the real world.
His pitch is almost suspiciously simple: the work matters, the software should not get in the way, and beautiful tools are not a luxury reserved for consumer apps. The people filing the reports are the people serving kids. They deserve better than a spreadsheet held together with hope.
Before the term sheets, Allen was a seventh-grade science teacher. He came in through Teach For America and stood at the front of a classroom at Alain Locke Charter School in Chicago. What he noticed there was not about chemistry. It was that questions of trauma, race, and identity - the things actually shaping whether a kid could learn - never got a seat in the room.
So in 2013 he and Marie Dandie built an after-school program around exactly those questions. Identity. Sociology. The research of Claude Steele and others who argued that how a student sees themselves quietly governs how far they get. That program grew into pilotED Schools, and on August 6, 2018, Allen opened its first charter, pilotED Bethel Park, in Indianapolis - a liberal arts model built to interrupt cycles of generational poverty by helping students become, in the network's phrase, their own agents of achievement and change.
Running a school means running an obstacle course of state and city reporting. Allen and his colleagues found themselves overwhelmed by the sheer volume owed to the Indiana Department of Education and the city of Indianapolis. The reports were necessary. They were also a black hole for time that belonged to students. That black hole has a name now. It is called the problem Reportwell solves.
A central hub where schools and agencies file everything from attendance to grant accounting - with AI smoothing the parts that used to eat whole afternoons.
Allen (CEO), Lani Luo (COO), Jennica Adkins (CCO), Jacob Peters (CPO), and David Spitz (CFO) - former educators and agency leaders turned software builders.
Detroit Venture Partners, Charter School Growth Fund, Ruthless for Good, Everywhere Ventures, Techstars - plus Dug Song, founder of Duo Security.
Starting in K-12 education, with an eye on every regulated corner that drowns in paperwork: higher ed, utilities, health care.
The company lists Levity right next to Quality and Clarity. Even the team headshots are in on the joke.
When Allen described the idea, school leaders did not just nod. They asked to be among the first to use it.
Less time on paperwork, more time on the mission. That has been the whole point, from the classroom to the codebase.