Making public education dollars easy to reach
Joseph Connor runs Odyssey, a New York company that sits in an unglamorous but decisive spot in American education: the gap between a state that has approved money for a child's schooling and a parent trying to actually spend it.
School choice programs, and education savings accounts (ESAs) in particular, have spread quickly across the country. States pass laws putting public dollars into accounts that families can use for tuition, tutoring, curriculum, technology and other approved expenses. The politics get all the attention. The plumbing does not. Yet the plumbing is where most programs succeed or stall. A parent who cannot figure out how to enroll, prove eligibility, or pay a vendor is a parent for whom the program does not really exist.
Odyssey builds that plumbing. Its platform walks families through eligibility, manages applications and identity verification, and runs a closed, state-regulated marketplace where approved vendors sell products and services that ESA funds can buy. States contract with Odyssey to administer the whole flow. By the time Connor took the stage at the ASU+GSV Summit in 2025, the company counted more than 140,000 students across seven states who had reached over $375 million in state funding through its rails.
The piece Connor talks about most is speed. Traditional programs could take a month or two to confirm that a family qualified. Odyssey built what he calls the first real-time identity verification technology in the country, delivering an answer in under a second. It sounds like a small engineering detail. In practice it is the difference between a program that feels like a government form and one that feels like signing up for a service.
"We want to empower parents through these types of programs, and so we want to make sure that they're accessible to everyone."Joseph Connor, to TechCrunch, 2024
That framing, access over ideology, is deliberate. School choice is one of the most contested subjects in American education, and Connor is not shy about the cause. But Odyssey's pitch is operational. It works with state agencies, vendors and parents to move approved money to approved uses, quickly and with an audit trail. When the company raised its $10 million Series A in May 2024, revenue had reportedly tripled over the prior year, and the round drew a notable mix of backers: Bradley Tusk of Tusk Venture Partners led it, with Katherine Boyle of Andreessen Horowitz, Ben Ling of Bling Capital and Ben Kohlmann of Cubit Capital joining. a16z had already backed the company in an earlier round.
Teacher, then lawyer, then founder
Connor did not arrive at education technology from a computer science lab. He arrived from the front of a classroom. He grew up the middle child of a family in suburban Philadelphia that treated education as central, attended Catholic schools, and remembers a teacher named Ms. Connor who once bought him a science kit with her own money to feed his curiosity. He credits moments like that for a lifelong respect for the people who do the daily work of teaching.
He started his own career in that same work, teaching in low-income charter schools in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and San Jose, with stints at the KIPP and Rocketship Education networks. Teaching showed him the impact one adult can have on a room of children. It also showed him the ceiling. The problems he cared about, funding, policy, access, were structural, and structural problems do not yield to a single great lesson plan.
So he went to Notre Dame Law School, graduating with his J.D. in 2016. There he worked as a research assistant to the education law scholar Nicole Stelle Garnett and consulted for the Alliance for Catholic Education. Afterward he joined the Philadelphia firm Drinker Biddle & Reath (now Faegre Drinker), advising startups, school networks and nonprofits, and contributed to an amicus brief in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, the landmark 2020 Supreme Court school choice case. Garnett's assessment of his role in the movement is unsparing in its confidence.
"It is not an exaggeration to say that the future success of parental choice in the United States is in the hands of Joe."Nicole Stelle Garnett, Notre Dame Law School
Between the law firm and Odyssey came a hands-on detour. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Connor co-founded SchoolHouse, a network of microschools, raising $8.1 million and scaling to roughly 50 small schools across nine states, each enrolling somewhere between five and fifteen students. He gave the teachers coaching, supplies, health insurance and back-office support. Running that network taught him something that would define his next company: the hardest part was not opening schools, it was helping families actually get and use the public money they were entitled to. Parents wanted options that traditional schools were not offering, and the funding mechanisms were not built for them.
Odyssey, founded in 2021 and originally called Agora, was the answer to that bottleneck. Instead of running schools, it would run the infrastructure that connects families, funds and educational services. It raised $4.75 million in seed funding in 2022 and has grown into the reference platform for states rolling out ESA programs.
Grit, foresight, and a Stripe-shaped ambition
Ask Connor what it takes to build something like Odyssey and he lands on three things: grit, foresight and storytelling. Grit because, as he puts it, challenges hit you every day when you dive into something new. Foresight because he saw early that parents wanted something the default system was not providing. Storytelling because partnerships and investment do not close on spreadsheets alone; people want an emotional connection to the mission.
His design north star is Stripe. Connor openly admires its co-founder Patrick Collison for taking something genuinely complicated, moving money online, and making it feel simple. That is the standard he holds Odyssey to: education funding should feel as seamless as a good checkout flow, not like a trip to a government office. It is a high bar for a product whose counterparties are state agencies and compliance rules.
Underneath the product philosophy is a personal one, inherited from his mother: to whom much is given, much will be required. He talks about collaboration as the real engine of social change, not lone genius. For someone building infrastructure that only works when states, vendors and parents all cooperate, that belief is not just sentiment. It is the operating assumption of the whole business.
Grit
"Starting anything, especially a company, is tough. Challenges hit you every day when diving into something new."
Foresight
He acted on a simple read of the market: parents wanted something traditional schools were not offering.
Storytelling
Beyond rational arguments, he says, people want an emotional connection - and that connection drives partnerships.
Simplicity
Modeled on Stripe: make a complex, regulated process feel effortless for the family using it.
The short version
Who is Joseph Connor?
The founder and CEO of Odyssey, a New York technology company that helps states administer school choice programs like education savings accounts. He is a former teacher and a Notre Dame-trained attorney.
What is Odyssey?
A platform that helps states run school choice programs end to end: parent education, applications, real-time identity verification, fund disbursement and a state-regulated marketplace of educational vendors. It has helped 140,000+ students access $375M+ in funding across seven states.
How much has Odyssey raised?
A $4.75M seed round in 2022 and a $10M Series A in May 2024 led by Tusk Venture Partners, with backing from a16z, Bling Capital and Cubit Capital.
What did he do before Odyssey?
Taught at KIPP and Rocketship, earned a J.D. from Notre Dame Law School, worked as an attorney including on the Espinoza v. Montana Supreme Court case, and co-founded the microschool network SchoolHouse.
Where is Odyssey based?
Headquartered at 325 Hudson Street in New York City, with programs operating in states including Iowa, Idaho and Missouri.