edtech-founder
(24)
Jeff Scheur Graded 15,000 Papers. Then He Rebuilt the Feedback Loop.
A Chicago English teacher turned a 2 a.m. grading ritual into NoRedInk. His enduring idea is disarmingly practical: software should give students room to practice and give teachers more time to teach.
Nitesh Goel Built a Wall. Teachers Turned It Into a World.
A student project, a surprise bandwidth bill and one stubbornly simple idea became Padlet - the visual canvas now used by 40 million people around the world.
Akshay Sanghai Is Building an English Classroom That Talks Back
The MySivi co-founder left large-company engineering for a harder systems problem: giving millions of learners a patient place to practise, make mistakes and speak again.
Mattia Mauro Is Building the Tutor He Wanted for His Little Sister
A physics tournament, a broken childhood computer, and one stubborn question about how students really learn led Mattia Mauro from research and investing to the classroom.
Kunaal Satija Is Building the Study Habit That Fits in a Pocket
The EduRev founder started with second-hand books, learned the limits of selling software one school at a time, and built a learning platform around a stubborn idea: useful education should travel farther than a good teacher can.
Arpit Jain Bet the iPad Could Make Learning Feel Like Play
His first education startup was early. His second began with four classmates, a new tablet, and a stubborn question: what if children could practise hard things without learning to fear them?
Melvin Hines Built a Company Around the Students Higher Ed Forgets
Only 68 students from his high-school class of 250 reached graduation. Hines turned that number into a 13-year operating thesis: support should arrive before a student has to ask.
Mike Murphy and the Quiet Machinery of Trust
Before remote exams became ordinary, an Army intelligence analyst turned marketer was already asking a difficult question: how do you build trust between people who never share a room?
Diego Fanara Turned a Lonely University Choice Into a Global Conversation
A teenager arrived in London with rankings, brochures and too few honest answers. Diego Fanara built Unibuddy so the next student could ask someone who had actually been there.
Steven Gittleson Learned to Stop Worshipping the Software
He began coding games at 12 and sold software at 15. Decades later, LightSail taught its engineer-founder a harder lesson: in a classroom, technology works best when it listens.
He Built a Parenting App for the Question No Spreadsheet Could Answer
Gustavo Rodriguez knew how to read a deal. Becoming a father taught him that the harder problem was turning a mountain of child-development research into one useful thing a tired parent could do next.
Alec Whitters Bet His Dental Career on a Phone-Sized Flashcard
Alec Whitters was almost a dentist. Then a box of paper flashcards looked absurd beside his smartphone - and a stubborn Iowa experiment became a test-prep business used around the world.
Martin Schneider
Martin Schneider is the co-founder and CEO of RemNote, the all-in-one note-taking and spaced-repetition app he started coding as an MIT computer science student in 2017 to fix his own habit of forgetting everything he learned a semester later. What began as a private side project he used alone for three years grew into a learning platform with over a million users, backed by a $2.8M seed round from General Catalyst, 468 Capital, Soma Capital and Dorm Room Fund. He blends learning science, neuroscience and software to chase a single idea: that you should be able to learn something once and remember it forever.
Sara Leoni
Sara Leoni is the founder and CEO of Ziplines Education, a Bay Area career accelerator that partners with 30-plus universities to deliver industry-recognized certificate programs in fields like AI, project management, and digital marketing. A former Division I softball player at UNLV and ex-CEO of the $50M course-materials company Rafter, she raised a $6.4M Series A in 2023-2024 to help close the digital skills gap and has helped more than 20,000 adult learners retool their careers. She frames learning as a zipline: intimidating, exhilarating, and continuous, with a clear start and a clear landing.
Vu Van
Vu Van is the Vietnamese-born co-founder and CEO of ELSA (English Language Speech Assistant), an AI-powered app that gives non-native speakers instant feedback on English pronunciation, fluency and intonation. She built the idea out of her own struggle to be understood as a Stanford graduate student, teamed up with speech-recognition scientist Xavier Anguera, and has grown ELSA into one of the world's largest AI language platforms, with tens of millions of users across roughly 190 countries. She is a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer and Endeavor entrepreneur.
Katie Fang
Katie Fang is the founder and CEO of SchooLinks, an Austin-based education technology company whose college and career readiness platform serves millions of K-12 students across U.S. school districts. Born in Shanghai and educated across four countries, she taught herself to code and built the first version of the product with $5,000 in savings, then grew it from a student-facing app into an enterprise SaaS platform that school districts use to track and improve student outcomes. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in Education, she has taken SchooLinks onto the Inc. 5000 list three years running and raised roughly $90 million in venture funding through a 2024 Series B.
Ephraim Luft
Ephraim Luft is the co-founder and CEO of Togetherhood, a New York-based platform that helps schools, residential buildings and community spaces source, schedule and manage high-quality enrichment programs taught by vetted independent teaching artists and coaches. He built the company with his wife Danielle after pandemic remote learning collapsed for their own family in 2020, prompting them to rent space, hire teachers and build a classroom from scratch. Before Togetherhood, Ephraim was Chief Product Officer at luxury fashion platform Farfetch, where he sat on the executive board through its roughly $7B IPO, and earlier co-founded and led Circle of Moms, a parenting social network acquired by POPSUGAR in 2012. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Madeline Hilliard
Madeline Hilliard is the founder and CEO of DopaGE, a gamified overdose-prevention education platform built by physicians, neuroscientists, and video-game engineers for colleges and healthcare organizations. A USC computational-neuroscience graduate and Nationally Registered EMT who treated overdose patients in ambulances and ERs, she founded the nonprofit Team Awareness Combating Overdose (T.A.C.O.) in 2020 the same day a college friend died from a polysubstance overdose. T.A.C.O. now runs on roughly 300 student volunteers nationwide and is credited with saving lives in the four digits. She and co-founder Amanda Grennan were named to the 2023 Forbes 30 Under 30 list in Education.
Siran Jiang
Siran Jiang is the CEO and cofounder of Moonlight, a San Francisco edtech startup that began as a gamified focus-and-productivity app and grew into an AI-powered personalized learning platform turning lessons into quests for kids. A daughter of generations of teachers, she traded a finance-and-entertainment resume that runs from Evercore and Warburg Pincus to MGM Studios and Activision Blizzard's Call of Duty for a mission built on attention. She holds a BA from Columbia and an MBA from Stanford GSB, and on the side has spent over a decade as a college admissions tutor.
Will Geiger
Will Geiger is the cofounder and CEO of Scholarships360, a free platform that helps students find and win scholarships to pay for college. A first-generation college graduate himself, he spent nearly a decade inside the admissions machine - reading more than 10,000 applications as a Senior Assistant Director of Admissions at Kenyon College, running its merit scholarship program, and counseling teenagers through the college maze at Hopkins School - before teaming up with his brother Brian to rebuild the broken scholarship search from scratch. Scholarships360 raised a $250,000 seed round in 2021 and now reaches students nationwide with vetted scholarships and personalized financial aid guidance.
Will Morris
Will Morris is the founder and CEO of EdConnective, a Richmond, Virginia company that delivers one-to-one virtual instructional coaching to teachers, instructional coaches, and K-12 leaders. After a year mentoring African American freshmen in a Chicago charter school and graduate research at the University of Pennsylvania on coaching as a lever of teacher quality, he built a platform that pairs educators with coaches the way a dating site pairs partners, then feeds them timely, non-evaluative video feedback. EdConnective operates across more than a dozen states, has delivered thousands of coaching sessions, and reports double-digit gains in student engagement and mastery.
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.
Daniel Villegas
Daniel Villegas is Co-Founder and COO of Domestika, the world's fastest-growing online learning community for creative professionals. Starting from a scrappy Spanish-language forum in 2002, Daniel helped steer Domestika into a $1.3 billion unicorn with over 10 million members worldwide. Based in New York, he brings over two decades of experience across e-commerce, digital marketing, SEO, and startup operations — including earlier ventures as co-founder of Webpop and founder of Infohostal.com — making him one of the key architects of a platform that has trained millions of designers, illustrators, photographers, and creators globally.
Dave Vasen
Dave Vasen is the founder and CEO of brightwheel, the leading all-in-one software platform for early education that serves thousands of childcare centers and preschools across the US. A Stanford and Wharton graduate, Vasen left AltSchool in 2014 to build brightwheel after seeing firsthand how preschool operators struggle to run both a classroom and a business simultaneously. He famously appeared on Shark Tank in 2016 where Mark Cuban and Chris Sacca fought over the deal, landing a $600K investment. Brightwheel has since raised $88.8M in total funding and reached a $700M+ valuation by 2024, with $75M in annual revenue - making it one of the most impactful companies in the early childhood education space.