early-learning
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HOMER turns dinosaur obsessions into reading lessons
A child wants dinosaurs. A parent wants reading practice. HOMER built a business around making those two wishes meet - then took the lessons beyond the tablet.
Diane Trister Dodge
Diane Trister Dodge is an early childhood educator, author, and entrepreneur who founded Teaching Strategies and created The Creative Curriculum. What began as a homemade filmstrip and a self-published guide run out of her basement in 1978 grew, over 24 years, into the largest early childhood education publisher in the United States, with materials now reaching more than 15 million children, including roughly 90 percent of Head Start programs. She built her work around a single conviction - that children learn in the context of relationships - and after retiring in 2012 she and her husband Lowell channeled the proceeds into scholarships and programs for children in poverty.
Charles Bonello
Charles Bonello is the co-founder and CEO of Vivvi, a New York-based company reinventing child care and early learning by partnering with employers to make full-time and backup care more accessible and affordable for working families. Before Vivvi, he co-founded Grand Central Tech, one of New York's largest and most selective startup communities, and worked in investment research and venture financing. His work is driven by a conviction that child care is the single biggest pain point for working parents, and he has built Vivvi into a network of NYC campuses backed by $17.2 million in funding.
Vivvi
Vivvi is a New York-based child care and early learning company that partners with employers to make high-quality care affordable and flexible for working families. Founded in 2018 by Charles Bonello and Ben Newton, it operates a growing network of early learning campuses for children from six weeks to five years old, and layers on employer-sponsored offerings such as backup care, in-home care, virtual tutoring, and its Care Cash reimbursement program. The model turns child care into a recruiting and retention benefit for companies while giving parents full-day, year-round, research-based programs.
Begin
Begin (legally Conscious Content Media, dba BEGiN) is a New York-based early-learning company that builds research-backed, play-based products for kids ages 2-10. Its portfolio - HOMER, codeSpark, Little Passports, and the Sesame Workshop partnership app Learn with Sesame - blends digital, physical, and experiential learning around a '6Cs' skills framework, and has reached more than 10 million families. Backed by LEGO Ventures, Sesame Workshop, and Gymboree, the company raised a $94.5M Series D in late 2022 before entering a prenegotiated Chapter 11 restructuring in December 2025 to cut roughly $106.5M in debt and continue operating its brands.