LiveSchool, Inc. - Brentwood, TN
Company Profile - EdTech / K-12
LiveSchool
The behavior-tracking and rewards platform that turns "catch them being good" from a slogan into a system schools can actually run.
The behavior-tracking and rewards platform that turns "catch them being good" from a slogan into a system schools can actually run.
In 2011, Matt Rubinstein was a middle-school teacher in Nashville, not a software CEO. His school ran a weekly "paycheck" system - students earned paper bucks for good behavior and cashed them in for rewards. The idea worked. The paperwork did not. Rubinstein's fifth-grade team was burning roughly two hours a week tallying paper.
So he wrote code. The first version of LiveSchool let teachers award points from iPads instead of counting slips by hand, and it handed those two hours back. That prototype became a company. More than a decade later, LiveSchool reports serving over 1,200 schools, with tens of millions of points awarded and more than a million rewards redeemed in a single school year.
The product's premise is deliberately narrow: make it trivially fast to notice good behavior, and schools will do more of it. A teacher taps a phone or a browser and awards or deducts points in seconds. Students spend those points in a paperless rewards store. Administrators watch the whole building's culture data move in real time. Families get a weekly recap of how their kid is doing.
It is not a flashy category. It is a useful one - and LiveSchool has stayed lean while occupying it, a roughly 16-person team serving well over a thousand schools across the United States.
School behavior systems historically default to discipline: the record fills up when something goes wrong. Recognition, meanwhile, lives on paper - sticker charts, tickets, and Friday stores that eat teacher time and rarely produce data anyone can act on.
LiveSchool's guiding number is a ratio - five moments of recognition for every one correction - built on a simple idea: what gets noticed gets repeated. The software exists to make the "noticed" part fast enough that busy teachers will actually do it between classes.
Schools use it to reduce referrals by shifting focus from punishment to positive reinforcement, and to run whole-building initiatives - PBIS, SEL, RTI, and MTSS - from one place instead of a stack of disconnected tools.
Five positives for every correction - not because criticism is wrong, but because attention is what students repeat.
Award or deduct behavior points in seconds from a phone or browser - the paper-free replacement for tickets and tally sheets.
A paperless digital store where students redeem earned points, designed to be simple enough that students run it themselves.
Team-based "house" competition that builds school spirit and belonging across classrooms and grades.
A live activity Timeline plus the positive-to-negative ratio for any student, staff member, grade, or the whole school.
Automated weekly emails to families summarizing a student's behavior - keeping home and school on the same team.
QR-code badges that speed up awarding points and redeeming rewards during busy school moments.
B2B SaaS sold to K-12 schools and districts. School-wide pricing runs roughly $3 per student per year; per-staff plans range from about $59/user/year (Lite, 15-staff minimum) to about $99/user/year for Premium and Premium Plus.
Public, charter, and private K-12 schools across the U.S. - teachers, administrators, students, and families. Milestones cited 150+ schools across 30+ states in 2015, growing to 1,200+ today.
Educator-first and feedback-driven: the team says every feature comes from real teachers, administrators, and schools. The founder taught the classroom the product serves - a rare origin in edtech.
LiveSchool sits in the K-12 behavior and school-culture category, purpose-built for school-wide PBIS with a built-in rewards store, house points, and administrator analytics - aimed at the whole building rather than a single classroom.
Competitors and adjacent tools include ClassDojo, PBIS Rewards, Kickboard, Bloomz, and Hero. LiveSchool's differentiator is a tightly integrated store-plus-insights loop tuned for administrators, not just classroom engagement.
Seed-funded by friends and family, then a $1.65M Series A in 2013 from a Nashville fund (about $2.4M total raised). The company has stayed small and focused rather than chasing scale for its own sake.
Teacher Matt Rubinstein builds a prototype to replace his school's paper "paycheck" system, saving his team two hours a week.
A Nashville fund backs the behavior-management app; the round is covered by EdSurge.
The platform reaches 150+ schools across 30+ states.
The dedicated mobile app lands on the App Store, letting staff award points from anywhere in the building.
LiveSchool reports tens of millions of points awarded and over a million rewards redeemed per school year.
It's a K-12 platform for tracking student behavior and running rewards. Teachers award or deduct points, students redeem them in a digital store, and administrators see school-culture data in real time - all built around PBIS.
Matt Rubinstein, a former Nashville middle-school teacher, founded it in 2011 (with co-founder Eric Rubinstein). Matt is the CEO.
School-wide pricing is roughly $3 per student per year. Per-staff plans run about $59/user/year for Lite (15-staff minimum) up to about $99/user/year for Premium and Premium Plus.
LiveSchool is purpose-built for school-wide PBIS with a built-in rewards store, house points, and an Insights dashboard for administrators - aimed at whole-building culture rather than only single-classroom engagement.
The company reports 1,200+ schools, with tens of millions of behavior points awarded and over a million rewards redeemed each school year.