e-learning
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John Dunavan Built Learning Systems for 2,000 Therapists. Now He Wants Knowledge to Behave More Like a Conversation.
Across two decades in learning and development, John Dunavan has kept returning to one stubborn idea: useful knowledge should move at the speed of the people who need it.
Mohammad Almadani Built Classera for the Places the Internet Barely Reached
A dorm-room partnership became a learning platform used across more than 40 countries. Almadani's wager is simple: education technology matters most when it works under imperfect conditions.
Deb Hannah Keeps Changing the Aisle
From Kotex packaging and Starbucks snack shelves to Shoe Carnival’s customer data and K12’s virtual classrooms, Deb Hannah has spent a career studying how a choice gets made - then rebuilding the path around it.
The Teacher Who Kept Marketing to Teachers
He taught eighth grade for nine years and was named Teacher of the Year. Then he spent the next two decades convincing the world's biggest education brands to market like they still remembered the classroom.
Sanford Kenyon
Sanford Kenyon is an education-technology executive who led BloomBoard, a Pittsburgh-based company that helps teachers advance their careers and pay by earning micro-credentials tied to real classroom practice. After roughly five years in executive roles at PayPal and eBay, he spent more than a decade in K-12 software - as President & CEO of SchoolMessenger (Reliance Communications) and a VP in Blackboard's K-12 business - before joining BloomBoard in 2015 as Chief Revenue Officer and becoming CEO in early 2017.
Daniel Blackman
Daniel Blackman is the founder and CEO of Smashcut, a next-generation online learning platform built for real-time, media-based education in the visual and media arts. An NYU Tisch film school graduate, he spent years in executive roles at Google, YouTube, The Daily Beast, Barnes & Noble.com and HarperCollins before co-founding the instructional video company Howcast and, later, Smashcut. Backed by a $7M Series A from Pearson Ventures, Smashcut partners with universities like NYU Tisch to bring collaborative filmmaking and documentary education online.
Gary Apito
Gary Apito is the Chief Executive Officer of Rouxbe, the online culinary school that has trained more than one million students across 180 countries. A career culinary-education operator, he spent seventeen years helping build the French Culinary Institute and International Culinary Center in New York before moving into online learning, joining Rouxbe in 2016 and rising from VP of Operations to COO to CEO. His focus is scaling professional-grade cooking instruction through high-definition video as traditional brick-and-mortar culinary schools close worldwide.
Joshua Richards
Joshua Richards is the Chief Executive Officer of Boundless Learning, a Boston-based online program management and edtech company spun out of Pearson. He rose to the top job in January 2025 after serving as the company's Chief Product and Technology Officer and helping steer its transition into a standalone business. With more than two decades in technology and education, Richards leads a company serving roughly 17,000 learners across 150+ countries and having launched more than 450 online programs, focused on driving learner success through personalization and helping universities and institutions reach new audiences.
Jane Chen
Jane Chen is the founder and CEO of Letterly, an AI-assisted, human-in-the-loop writing platform that has helped more than 3,000 students across 30 states and seven countries write, revise, and publish their own work. A New York-born daughter of Chinese immigrants who returned from Shanghai unable to speak English, she studied history at Harvard, spent a decade on Wall Street as an investment banker and hedge fund analyst, then walked away from finance to rebuild how kids learn to write - starting with 30 students at a community center and growing into a seed-funded company with nearly 13,000 published student articles.
Jennifer Liu
Jennifer Liu is the cofounder and CEO of Toko, an AI English tutor that got its start when a pandemic-era hack called GPT 奶奶 (an AI grandma built to help her practice Mandarin) revealed a far bigger hunger for spoken English across East Asia. An MIT computer science grad and early Quizlet engineer-turned-PM, Liu turned that side project into a Y Combinator (W22) company that now ranks among the top education apps in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Thailand, with 4.9 stars from 20,000-plus reviewers.
Jeremy Keeshin
Jeremy Keeshin is the CEO and co-founder of CodeHS, the online platform that teaches computer science to millions of middle and high school students. A Stanford computer science graduate who cut his teeth as a section leader for the university's legendary intro programming courses, he launched CodeHS in 2012 with classmate Zach Galant to bring coding to schools that had never offered it. He wrote 'Read Write Code,' a friendly primer arguing that coding is the new literacy, and he still finds time to juggle, chase crosswords, and crack jokes rooted in his college days running the satirical paper The Stanford Flipside.
Adrien Fraise
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
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
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
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
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.
Nhon Ma
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.
Paul Slavin
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.
Valentin Ruest
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
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.
Amit Dayal
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
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 Cotorruelo
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.
Vicky Wang
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.
Irana Wasti
Irana Wasti is the CEO of Thought Industries, the AI-powered customer learning and engagement platform trusted by 99 of the Fortune 100. A product leader who scaled GoDaddy's EMEA business past $500M and helped take BILL to $1B in annual revenue, she now leads Thought Industries through its transformation into an agentic AI intelligence platform that connects learning, customer behavior, and business outcomes. With a CS degree from UC Berkeley and an MBA from Harvard Business School, she has spent 20+ years at the intersection of technology, product, and growth.
Henrique Andrade
Henrique Andrade is the CEO and co-founder of CEFIS, Brazil's largest corporate education platform for accounting, tax, and labor law professionals. Founded in Goiânia in 2013 and launched in 2014, CEFIS has scaled to over 400,000 students and 5,000+ courses, reaching its first million reais in revenue within 14 months. Under Andrade's leadership, CEFIS expanded internationally to Redwood City, California in 2018, inspired by Silicon Valley's best practices in e-learning and talent management. Based in San Francisco, Andrade blends a meritocracy-driven culture - drawing inspiration from Goldman Sachs and the 3G Group - with a Google-style workplace designed to attract top engineering talent.
Joaquin Olmedo
Joaquin Olmedo is the co-founder and CEO of Filadd (YC S21), a Córdoba-born edtech platform helping students across Latin America get into — and through — university. What began in 2016 as an online prep course for Argentine university entrance exams has grown into a four-country operation serving over 25,000 students annually, with 90% year-over-year growth and recognition as one of Holon IQ's 100 Leading LatAm EdTechs. An industrial engineer by training, Olmedo applied to Y Combinator on a Mexican investor's offhand suggestion and was accepted — with metrics that caught the partners' attention immediately.
Brian Park
Brian Park is the CEO of Skillest, the world's leading remote sports coaching marketplace that connects athletes with elite coaches through asynchronous video analysis. A Silicon Valley veteran who was the 95th employee at Yahoo and co-founder of Yahoo! Messenger, Park pivoted to sports tech to democratize access to elite coaching - putting a world-class coach in every athlete's pocket. Under his leadership, Skillest has grown to 600+ coaches, 200,000+ golfers, and secured partnerships with Stephen Curry's UNDERRATED Golf and Arccos Golf, becoming the digital coaching standard in golf and expanding across multiple sports.
Jim Garrison
Jim Garrison is the Founder and President of Ubiquity University, a next-generation global learning platform blending academic rigor with consciousness development, social innovation, and transformative education. Born in 1951 in Szechuan Province, China, to Baptist missionary parents, Garrison holds a PhD in Philosophical Theology from Cambridge and has spent five decades at the intersection of education, diplomacy, and civilizational transformation - co-founding the Gorbachev Foundation/USA with Mikhail Gorbachev after the Cold War, launching the State of the World Forum, and more recently convening Humanity Rising, a global summit initiative launched in 2020 that has engaged hundreds of thousands of activists worldwide.
Anurupa Ganguly
Anurupa Ganguly is the founder and CEO of Prisms, a spatial learning platform that uses virtual reality to teach core math and science to middle and high school students. A former math and physics teacher with degrees from MIT and Boston University, she built Prisms after a decade-plus in education leadership at Boston Public Schools and the NYC Department of Education. Backed by Andreessen Horowitz with $18.4M raised, Prisms now reaches 300,000+ students across 300+ school districts in 35 states, delivering measurable gains in algebra and science comprehension through embodied, problem-driven VR experiences.