Ironhack is a global tech school offering intensive bootcamps in web development, data analytics, UX/UI design, cybersecurity, AI engineering and more. Founded in 2013, it runs on-campus programs across cities in Europe, Latin America and the US plus a remote track, pairing immersive project-based training with embedded career services and a network of hiring partners to move career-changers into tech jobs quickly.
Practera is an Australian-born education technology company that helps universities, employers and governments run real-world learning programs at scale. Its SaaS platform lets educators design, deliver and assess experiential programs - internships, industry projects, mentoring and micro-credentials - while AI-powered analytics flag struggling learners and measure outcomes. The flagship product of Intersective, Practera connects students with authentic industry work to build the skills employers actually want.
Prenda is an Arizona-based education company that gives everyday adults - called guides - the software, curriculum, training, and support to open and run small, tuition-free K-8 microschools of 5 to 10 students out of homes, libraries, and community spaces. Founded by Kelly Smith after he started a learning club around his kitchen table, Prenda partners with state-credentialed institutions and school-choice programs so families pay little or nothing, while students learn at their own pace through a 'connect, conquer, collaborate, create' day built around mastery and student agency.
Rajen Sheth is the CEO and co-founder of Kyron Learning, a public benefit company using AI to give every student access to high-quality one-on-one teaching. Before founding Kyron, he spent 17 years at Google, where he was the original product manager behind Google Apps (now Workspace), launched Chromebooks for Education, and rose to Vice President of Google Cloud AI and Industry Solutions. A Stanford-trained engineer who once pitched enterprise Gmail to Eric Schmidt and got turned down, he has built tools used by millions of businesses and hundreds of millions of students, then walked away from big tech to chase a teacher-shaped problem he has carried since sixth grade.
Mohammed Ali Mukri is an education operator and angel investor who works across the UAE and Pakistan with The Millennium Universal College (TMUC). A self-described people leader who runs on the mantra 'speed beats perfection,' he pairs front-line institution building with early-stage bets in health care, enterprise software, and education.
GPTZero is a New York-based AI startup that builds tools to detect AI-generated text and verify human authorship. Launched in January 2023 by Princeton senior Edward Tian, it grew from a viral side project into a profitable company serving over 10 million users and 100+ organizations across education, hiring, publishing, and legal. Its mission is to restore trust and transparency to writing on the internet as large language models flood it with machine-made text.
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.
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.
BoldVoice is a New York-based AI speech and accent coaching app that helps non-native English speakers communicate more clearly and confidently. It pairs proprietary speech AI that gives instant, phoneme-level pronunciation feedback with video lessons taught by Hollywood dialect coaches. Founded in 2021 by Anada Lakra and Ilya Usorov, the app has passed five million downloads across 150+ countries and crossed $10M in annual recurring revenue with a small team.
Crimson Education is a New Zealand-founded edtech company that helps ambitious students win places at the world's most selective universities - the Ivy League, Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford and beyond. Through a mix of data, AI tools and a global network of roughly 3,000 tutors and former admissions officers, it offers admissions consulting, tutoring, extracurricular mentoring and its own accredited online high school, Crimson Global Academy. Founded in 2013, it became Australasia's first edtech unicorn in November 2024 at a NZ$1 billion valuation.
Embark Corporation is a New York-based education technology company that has built online application and admissions software since 1995. Its flagship platform, Embark Campus, runs the full admissions lifecycle - recruiting, applications, review, decisions, enrollment and data integration - for colleges, universities, fellowships and scholarship programs. Embark says its software has powered more than 16 million student applications for institutions including Harvard, NYU, Stanford and the Rhodes and Fulbright fellowships.
Goalsetter is a New York-based financial education and banking platform that teaches American kids, teens, and families how to save, spend smart, and invest. Founded by Tanya Van Court, it blends FDIC-insured savings, a 'Learn to Earn' debit card, and pop-culture-flavored financial quizzes mapped to national standards. The company also runs Goalsetter Classroom, a K-12 curriculum used by schools, framing financial literacy as a tool for closing the racial wealth gap.
Imprint is a New York based education company behind a visual microlearning app that turns dense subjects - psychology, philosophy, history, finance, science - into illustrated, bite-sized lessons you can finish in under 10 minutes a day. Built by mobile entertainment veteran Daniel Terry and developed under the legal entity Polywise, Inc., the app pairs original animation with daily quizzes and visual guides to bestselling nonfiction books. It became one of the highest grossing and most decorated learning apps, winning Google Play's Best App of 2023 and earning Apple Editors' Choice recognition.
Meadow is a New York-based fintech building modern financial engagement tools for higher education. Its platform helps colleges and universities communicate costs clearly, collect tuition, and support students from application through graduation - spanning a student-friendly net price calculator (Meadow Price), mobile billing and flexible payment plans (Meadow Pay), and compassionate balance recovery (Meadow Pre). Used by 300+ institutions, Meadow raised a $14M Series A led by Matrix Partners in April 2025.
Nas Company is the parent of the Nas Daily media brand and the creator-economy platforms Nas Academy and Nas.io, founded by viral one-minute video maker Nuseir Yassin. Its mission is to 'Bring People Together' by giving creators and community leaders the tools to teach, build memberships, sell digital products, and own their audience instead of renting it from social platforms. The ecosystem reaches hundreds of millions of people monthly and has raised more than $23M to date, beginning with an $11M Series A in 2021.
Parallel (Parallel Learning) is a New York-based special education company that connects school districts with licensed clinicians - school psychologists, speech-language pathologists, behavioral counselors, and specialized instructors - through a proprietary teletherapy and case-management platform. Founded in 2021 by Diana Heldfond, who was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia as a child, Parallel helps schools deliver legally required IEP services to students with learning and thinking differences when in-person staff are scarce. The company has raised about $48.9 million and reported that 98% of its students met or exceeded their IEP goals in the 2024-2025 school year.
Stepful is a New York-based healthcare education company that trains people for entry-level allied-health jobs - medical assistants, pharmacy technicians, surgical techs and more - through fast, affordable, AI-supported online programs. Roughly four months and about $2,500 replace a two-year, $20,000 community-college track, and graduates are funneled toward clinical hours and full-time jobs through a network of partner clinics and hospitals. The company pairs a B2C learner business with a growing B2B arm that helps health systems build their own talent pipelines, positioning itself as an end-to-end answer to the U.S. healthcare worker shortage.
Steve Gilman is the co-founder and CEO of OneRange, a New York-based AI-powered upskilling platform that lets employees discover, get approval for, and buy the learning resources they need, with companies paying only when people actually learn. Before software, Gilman was drafted by the Detroit Tigers out of Yale and then served as a Defense Intelligence Agency intelligence officer working counterproliferation missions out of US embassies in Cairo and Abu Dhabi. He frames OneRange as importing the world-class skill-development methods of pro sports and the military into the corporate world, and the company now works with 25-plus enterprises including Google, Wasserman, and Caylent.
Tom Griffiths is the CEO and co-founder of Hone, a live, cohort-based talent development platform that trains managers at companies like Indeed, ConocoPhillips, and Aramark. Before Hone, he co-founded daily fantasy sports company FanDuel and ran product for a decade as Chief Product Officer, helping pioneer a new category and grow it into a billion-dollar business with millions of users. A Cambridge computer scientist who left a machine learning PhD in Edinburgh to chase a startup, he now builds technology that teaches human skills.
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.
Yao Zhang is the founder and CEO of RoboTerra, a robotics-education company that teaches kids around the world to code and build robots. A Columbia-trained education economist who walked away from a finished PhD's worth of dissertation work to build hardware, she was named a 2016 Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and one of RoboHub's Top 25 Women in Robotics. RoboTerra has reached 1,000+ institutions across more than 40 countries, splitting its life between Silicon Valley and China.
Zack Perkins is the co-founder and CEO of CollegeVine, the Boston-based platform now deploying AI agents across more than 100 universities to handle recruiting, advising, and alumni outreach. He left Harvard as a sophomore in 2015 to build the company full time, growing it from a peer-advising side project called Admissions Hero into a service with millions of student members. His through-line is stubborn: the kid from a big public high school who never had an admissions officer show up for him now wants to hand that access to everyone.
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.
Alfredo Brillembourg is the cofounder and CEO of Meadow, a New York fintech rebuilding how American students pay for college. After a missed tuition deadline locked him out of registration as an undergraduate, he traded a finance track that ran through Goldman Sachs, Bowery Capital, and NEA for the unglamorous plumbing of campus billing. Meadow now serves over 170 colleges and universities, has delivered nearly a million net-price estimates, and raised a $14M Series A led by Matrix Partners in 2025.
Anada Lakra is the co-founder and CEO of BoldVoice, an AI-powered accent and speech coaching app for non-native English speakers. Born and raised in Albania, she studied English for a decade before arriving at Yale, where being asked to repeat herself sparked the idea that became BoldVoice. After Yale and an MBA from Harvard Business School, with product stints at Peloton and consulting work along the way, she and co-founder Ilya Usorov built a Y Combinator-backed app that pairs Hollywood dialect coaches with real-time AI feedback. BoldVoice has crossed 5 million downloads, serves professionals in 150+ countries, reached $10M+ in ARR with a team of seven, and raised a $21M Series A in January 2026 led by Matrix.
Carl Madi is the co-founder and CEO of Stepful, a New York healthtech and edtech company that trains people for allied healthcare careers in weeks instead of years. After scaling operations at Uber, Airbnb, Handy, and Amino Apps and earning an MBA from Wharton, he started Stepful in 2021 with Tressia Hobeika and Edoardo Serra. The company runs AI-assisted, cohort-based programs for medical assistants, pharmacy techs, and other frontline roles, places graduates through a network of 8,000+ clinical partners, and was ranked the #1 EdTech company in the U.S. by TIME in 2025.
Diana Heldfond DiGia is the founder and CEO of Parallel, the first tech-forward provider of special education care in the United States. Diagnosed with severe dyslexia and ADHD at seven, she built Parallel to deliver virtual psychoeducational assessments, teletherapy, and specialized instruction to K-12 school districts. The company now serves more than 10,000 students across 25 states, has raised $48.9M including a $20M Series B led by Valspring Capital, and reports that 98% of its students meet or exceed their IEP goals. She is a Forbes 30 Under 30 (Education, 2024) honoree.
Jamie Beaton is the New Zealand-born co-founder and CEO of Crimson Education, the global university-admissions consultancy he started at 18 from a Harvard dorm room. After getting into all 25 elite universities he applied to, he built Crimson into a roughly billion-dollar company spanning 25+ countries, while personally collecting degrees from Harvard, Stanford, Yale Law, Oxford (as a Rhodes Scholar) and more. He is the author of the bestselling admissions guide ACCEPTED!
Jeff Feldman is the CEO of Imprint, the New York visual-learning app that turns dense nonfiction into illustrated, bite-sized lessons. He joined in 2019 as Imprint's Founding Head of Product, became Chief Product Officer, and stepped into the CEO seat in 2024 as founder Daniel Terry moved to Executive Chairman. Before Imprint he built product at Resy and Pronoun, and studied at Harvard. Under his watch Imprint became a Google Best App of the Year and an Apple Editor's Choice.
Julie Hansen is Chief Revenue Officer and US CEO of Babbel, the language-learning company. She joined in 2017 and turned the US into Babbel's largest market, crossing one million US subscriptions in the first half of 2022. Before Babbel she was the fifth employee at Business Insider, where as President and COO she helped grow it into the most-visited business news site online. Her earlier career spans CBS Interactive, Conde Nast, Time Inc., and Penguin Books. She keeps German vocabulary notebooks, rows on the water at dawn, and was named to the 2025 ASU+GSV Power of Women honor list.