Adrien Fraise is the CEO and founder of ModernGuild, a New York-based edtech company that pairs high school and college students with one-on-one career coaches and a structured online readiness program. A former Deloitte strategy consultant with degrees from Stanford and Columbia Business School, he launched ModernGuild in January 2011 after concluding that traditional early-career recruiting was broken: too many resumes, too little real review, and too much bias. He built the company into a mentoring marketplace that has served tens of thousands of students, partnered with employers like Citibank and Wells Fargo, and went through the Techstars accelerator in 2017.
Elisa Piscitelli is the CEO and co-founder of Futurely (myfuturely.com), an Italian edtech platform that uses data and structured self-discovery to help teenagers choose what to study and who to become. A management engineer from Politecnico di Milano who went on to McKinsey and an MIT Master in Business Analytics on a Zegna scholarship, she traded a data-science career in California to build a company that now guides over 14,000 students a year across 50 schools and 30 companies. She was named to Forbes Italia's 30 Under 30 in 2021 for her work in education.
Hakan Unsal is the founder and CEO of Primerli, a Los Angeles area edtech company that compresses how an entire industry works into one-hour, entertainment-quality crash courses. A former BCG principal with a Cornell master's and a Columbia PhD, he started Primerli after years of cramming on unfamiliar sectors before client projects convinced him that slide decks are a terrible way to learn. His pitch: professional training should feel less like a lecture and more like a documentary you actually want to finish.
Scott Lee is the founder and CEO of Gooroo, a New York based education technology company building an AI-driven platform that matches students with the right tutor and bundles online courses, clubs and progress tracking under one roof. Born in Seoul and arriving in the US at 16 without speaking English, he leaned on tutors and mentors to find his footing, studied engineering at Columbia, paused to serve as a sergeant in the South Korean army, and worked as an analyst in JP Morgan's Chief Investment Office before going all in on education. He has raised more than $8 million and serves thousands of students worldwide, with a stated mission to make quality, personalized learning accessible to everyone.
Yermie Cohen is the founder and CEO of Memorang, an AI stack for education that lets organizations build, launch, and scale custom learning and assessment content. A med student who arrived at UCLA from MIT with biology and mechanical-engineering degrees, he was buried in flashcards and frustrated by tools that were either too simple or too expensive, so he built his own. Memorang began as a free spaced-repetition study app in 2013 and has since become a platform pitched at publishers, institutions, and professional organizations who want to turn expertise into AI-driven courses, quizzes, and exams with humans kept in the loop.
Classtime is a Zurich- and US-based education technology company building a web-based platform for formative and summative assessments. Teachers use it to create and grade quizzes, run collaborative challenges, and watch student understanding update in real time across any device. Founded in 2016, it serves hundreds of thousands of teachers and learners in more than 60 countries, with a free library of 30,000+ standards-aligned questions and a focus on grounding its design in learning science.
FlatWorld is a Boston-based college textbook publisher on a mission to make high-quality course materials affordable for students. Founded in 2007 as Flat World Knowledge by publishing veterans Eric Frank and Jeff Shelstad, it pioneered low-cost, customizable digital textbooks before being acquired and rebranded in 2016 by Alastair Adam and John Eielson. Today FlatWorld offers 145+ peer-reviewed titles across 20+ disciplines, an auto-graded homework system, AI study tools, audiobooks and print-on-demand books - typically priced between roughly $25 and $42, a fraction of traditional textbook costs.
Honor Education is a San Francisco-based edtech company building a mobile-first, AI-powered learning platform that turns passive online courses into interactive, social experiences. Founded by Joel Podolny, the founding Dean of Apple University, Honor helps universities, enterprises, and nonprofits encode expert knowledge into credentialed programs that learners actually finish - reporting 85% completion rates against a 15% industry average. The company raised a $38M Series A in 2025 and was named to TIME's Best Inventions of 2024.
Numerade is a Pasadena-based education technology company that turns dense STEM textbooks into short, step-by-step video lessons and an AI tutor named Ace. Founded in 2018 by Nhon Ma and Alex Lee, the platform pairs a network of expert educators with machine learning to give students affordable, on-demand help in math, science, and test prep - aiming to put a tutor in the pocket of any learner who could never afford one.
RoboTerra, Inc. is a Silicon Valley educational robotics company founded in 2014 that teaches middle- and high-school students to build robots and write real code. Its flagship Origin Kit pairs more than 85 hardware components and the RoboCore controller with the cloud-based, gamified Castle Rock learning platform, turning C++ programming into something a 10-year-old can pick up. Led by founder and CEO Yao Zhang, a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, the company set out to make hands-on robotics education accessible far beyond elite schools, reaching institutions across dozens of countries.
Skillshare is an online learning community where creatives learn by doing. Through tens of thousands of project-based video classes taught by working professionals - in illustration, design, photography, film, marketing, music and more - the New York-based platform turns a flat monthly subscription into access to a library built and taught by practitioners rather than academics. Founded in 2010, it has grown into one of the largest creative learning marketplaces in the world.
Slang is a B2B edtech company that teaches professional, industry-specific English to the global workforce. Born as an MIT research project on using AI and NLP to accelerate language learning, Slang now runs the largest catalog of specialized professional English courses in the world - 200+ paths spanning fields from engineering and finance to healthcare and logistics - delivered through a mobile-first platform used by companies and universities to build hyper-personalized learning journeys by role and industry.
Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) is a private, nonprofit, regionally accredited university based in Manchester/Hooksett, New Hampshire. Founded in 1932 as a small accounting school, it reinvented itself under president Paul LeBlanc into the largest nonprofit provider of online higher education in the United States, serving more than 200,000 learners through over 200 degree and certificate programs while keeping a roughly 3,000-student traditional campus.
Wiedza i Praktyka (WIP) is one of Poland's largest providers of specialist professional information. Founded in Warsaw in 1997, it equips accountants, HR and payroll specialists, occupational-safety officers, healthcare managers, educators, lawyers and public administrators with the practical, up-to-date guidance they need to apply constantly changing regulations. WIP blends print and e-letters, industry web portals, software tools, expert helplines, and the Educado online learning platform, plus open and in-house training through Akademia Wiedza i Praktyka. Since August 2025 it has been wholly owned by Germany's VNR Group.
Nhon Ma is the CEO and co-founder of Numerade, a Los Angeles-based education technology company building AI-powered STEM tutoring at scale. The son of Vietnamese refugees who grew up in south-central LA, he turned a full-scholarship private-school education and a two-tour stint at Google into a mission to close the educational opportunity gap. Numerade hosts one of the largest STEM video libraries online and an AI tutor named Ace, and raised a $26M Series A at a roughly $100M valuation.
Zigazoo is a video-based social network built specifically for kids and teens, where every post is human and AI moderated before it goes live. Founded by former educators during the pandemic as a daily challenge app for kids stuck at home, it grew into what the company calls the largest and safest social network for children in the world. Kids respond to short video challenges from museums, zoos, teachers, musicians and celebrities, earn in-app currency called Zigabucks, and connect through creativity rather than private chat. It is KidSAFE COPPA certified, has no text messaging, and removes anything negative before it ever reaches a feed.
Paul Slavin is the CEO of Skillshare, the New York online-learning marketplace, a role he stepped into in August 2025. He arrived by an unusual route: 33 years at ABC News, where he ran worldwide newsgathering, executive-produced World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, and collected a dozen Emmys and a Peabody before pivoting fully into digital. He went on to lead web video at Everyday Health, run the digital book publisher Open Road Integrated Media to profitability, advise on media M&A at Oaklins DeSilva+Phillips, and now steers a 30,000-class platform for creative learners and teachers worldwide.
Babbel is a Berlin-based language learning company that teaches 14 languages through short, expert-designed lessons built for real-life conversation. Founded in 2007 and operated under the legal name Lesson Nine GmbH, it pioneered the paid subscription model for language apps and has sold tens of millions of subscriptions worldwide. Its lessons - typically 10 to 15 minutes - are written by linguists rather than crowdsourced or generated, and the company has layered in speech recognition and AI speaking practice while keeping human-designed pedagogy at the center.
Ethena is a New York-based compliance and workplace-culture training platform that turns the most-dreaded items on the corporate calendar - harassment prevention, code of conduct, cybersecurity, DEI - into short, well-written, mobile-friendly lessons people actually finish. Founded in 2019 by Roxanne Bras Petraeus and Anne Solmssen, it pairs legally vetted content with microlearning, Slack/email nudges, an ethics hotline, case management and AI-built courses, serving customers like Netflix, Zendesk, Carta and Figma.
Valentin Ruest is the co-founder and US co-CEO of Classtime, a Zurich-born edtech company building a formative and summative assessment platform used by educators and learners in more than 90 countries. A University of St. Gallen and Harvard-trained economist who once ran mortgages at a Swiss fintech, he traded banking for classrooms, splitting his life between Santa Barbara and Zurich while teaching personal finance in public schools and arguing that software should help teachers decide, not decide for them.
Zak Ringelstein is the co-founder and CEO of Zigazoo, a moderated, kid-safe social network often described as the antidote to TikTok. A former public school teacher and Teach For America alum, he built and sold his first edtech company UClass to Renaissance Learning, ran a left-insurgent 2018 U.S. Senate campaign in Maine as the only DSA-endorsed major-party nominee, then launched Zigazoo with his wife Leah during the pandemic. The company has raised roughly $26M total, including a $17M celebrity-studded Series A, and made headlines when Australia exempted Zigazoo from its sweeping social media ban.
Paper is a Montreal-based education technology company that contracts with K-12 public school districts to give students unlimited, 24/7 access to live online tutoring, writing feedback, and college-and-career planning tools at no cost to families. Founded in 2014 as GradeSlam, it scaled to serve millions of students across hundreds of districts, reached unicorn status with a 2022 Series D, then weathered a sharp contraction in 2024 as pandemic-era school funding dried up.
Amit Dayal is Vice President and General Manager of Adobe's Digital Advertising, Learning, and Publishing Business - a portfolio that puts him at the intersection of AdTech, streaming media, and enterprise e-learning. With 30+ years of product leadership spanning Sequent Computer Systems, Oracle, Motorola, Yahoo, Samsung Electronics, and multiple Silicon Valley startups he co-founded or built PM functions from scratch, Dayal brings a rare depth of engineering-to-executive experience to one of tech's most creative companies. Based in Bengaluru, India, he leads strategy, product management, technology, marketing, and sales for Adobe Primetime and related platforms serving major media and entertainment companies globally.
Adrian Ridner is the CEO and Co-Founder of Study.com, one of the world's most visited online education platforms serving 34+ million monthly users. An Argentine-Jewish immigrant who navigated multiple countries before settling in California, Ridner built Study.com from a bootstrapped startup in 2002 into a 4,100-person company offering 20,000+ micro-video lessons and 200+ transferable college courses. His Working Scholars program has saved graduates $20 million in tuition and is particularly focused on first-generation college students and students of color. Ridner is a recipient of the ASU+GSV 2022 Innovator of Color Award and Silicon Valley Business Journal's 40 Under 40.
Julio G. Cotorruelo is the co-founder and CEO of Domestika, the global online learning community for creative professionals. Starting in 2002 as a modest Spanish-language forum for designers in Madrid, Domestika grew under his leadership into a unicorn valued at $1.3 billion, with over 8 million members, 2,000+ courses, and a presence in six languages. A notoriously press-shy entrepreneur, Cotorruelo built one of the world's largest creative education platforms by championing affordable, pay-per-course learning and the belief that creativity is best learned through doing - not just reading.
VIPKid is an online education platform that pairs young learners with native English-speaking teachers for live, one-on-one video classes. Founded in Beijing in 2013 by Cindy Mi, it grew into one of the world's largest live-tutoring marketplaces before pivoting to international markets after China's 2021 'double reduction' policy reshaped private tutoring.
WuKong Education is a Silicon Valley-headquartered online learning company founded in Auckland in 2016 that delivers live, small-group Mandarin Chinese, Math and English Language Arts classes to children aged 3 to 18 in more than 100 countries. Backed by Bessemer Venture Partners and Marcy Venture Partners, it serves over 400,000 families with a global teaching network of more than 3,000 instructors.
Vicky Wang is the founder and CEO of WuKong Education, a Silicon Valley-based online learning platform serving 300,000+ families across 118 countries. She built the company from Auckland, New Zealand in 2016 into a Series B-backed edtech brand with 4,000 employees, offering Chinese language, math, and English programs for students aged 3-18. Recognized by Fortune China as one of the Most Influential Business Women in 2021 and 2022, named among HolonIQ's 144 global EdTech Women Leaders, and awarded the 2024 Cognia School of Distinction, Wang is redefining how the world's children learn Mandarin and mathematics.
Cambly is an on-demand English tutoring platform that connects learners in 190+ countries with native English-speaking tutors available 24/7 via live video chat. Founded in 2012 by two former Google engineers, Cambly makes immersive English learning accessible and affordable - bringing the language-learning breakthrough of traveling abroad directly to any phone or laptop. With AI-powered personalization layered over millions of data points from a decade of real lessons, Cambly sits at the intersection of human connection and technology in the $60B+ global English education market.