k-12
(20)
Robin Sykes Still Counts in Bear Bucks
Before she led global brand and growth at Securly, Robin Sykes ran an elementary school's reward economy with hand-cut paper. Her career is a lesson in carrying classroom evidence into the boardroom.
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.
Aaron Feuer Turned a Student Survey Into a 15-Million-Student Company
A bill he helped pass as a teenager changed little. So the Los Angeles student organizer learned a durable founder lesson: institutions often move when someone gives them a tool, not merely an argument.
Matt Rubinstein
Matt Rubinstein is the founder and CEO of LiveSchool, a Nashville-born K-12 behavior and school-culture SaaS platform used by more than 1,200 schools across 48 states and 10+ countries. A former KIPP Nashville teaching fellow, he built the first LiveSchool prototype on an iPad to replace his own school's paper 'paycheck' behavior system, and has run the company since 2011.
Lauren Dachille
Lauren Dachille is the founder and CEO of Nimble, a Y Combinator-backed edtech company building data-driven applicant tracking software that helps K-12 school districts identify, hire, and retain effective teachers. A former DC Public Schools recruiter and StudentsFirst policy hand, she built the system she wished she'd had when sorting through thousands of teacher applications by hand.
Tim Novikoff
Tim Novikoff is the founder and CEO of Super Teacher, an AI tutoring app for elementary students that has reached roughly 20,000 families and public schools in New York, New Jersey, and Hawaii. A former NYC math teacher with a PhD in applied mathematics from Cornell, he co-authored a PNAS paper on the math of spaced repetition, built and sold the video-editing startup Fly Labs to Google in 2015, then worked on Google Photos and ran Google Colab before returning to education. As a kid he voiced Jeffy on MTV's animated series Daria.
Joe English
Joe English is the co-founder and CEO of Cartwheel, a school-based mental health company he launched in December 2022 to put licensed clinicians and a HIPAA-compliant platform inside K-12 districts. Cartwheel has grown into the largest K-12 mental health telehealth provider in the United States, reaching roughly 350 school districts across 15 states after nearly 300% year-over-year growth and raising a Series B that brought total funding to about $44 million. A Yale graduate and former student body president with an MBA from Harvard Business School, English previously founded the LGBTQ-inclusion nonprofit Hope in a Box and worked as a McKinsey consultant on K-12 education. He grew up on a farm in rural upstate New York, an experience that shaped his belief that schools are the natural front door for reaching kids and families.
Omar Dawood
Omar Dawood is the CEO and board member of Huddle Up, the pediatric digital health company formerly known as DotCom Therapy. A physician with four degrees and a long run through the digital mental-health world (Ginger, Calm, BetterUp), he now leads a team delivering speech, occupational, mental-health and special-education therapy to children across nearly 1,000 US school districts. Under his watch the company rebranded, closed a Series C led by Kayne Anderson Growth Capital, and crossed one million care sessions.
Diana Heldfond DiGia
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.
Rick Hess
Frederick M. Hess - known to nearly everyone in education circles as Rick - runs Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and writes the long-running Education Week column 'Rick Hess Straight Up.' A former high school social studies teacher with a Harvard PhD in government, he has authored or edited dozens of books on K-12 and higher education and is repeatedly ranked among the most influential people shaping U.S. education policy.
Martina Tam
Martina Tam is the CEO of Paper, the Montreal-based edtech company that runs one of North America's largest virtual tutoring services for K-12 districts. A Stanford and Wharton alum, she stepped in at the start of 2025 after operator stints at Brightwheel, MasterClass, and Eventbrite, and is now steering Paper's pivot toward its high-impact tutoring program, GROW.
Manan Khurma
Manan Khurma is the founder and chairman of Cuemath, an online math learning platform that teaches K-12 students across 80+ countries through live 1-on-1 classes. An IIT Delhi engineer who started teaching JEE math in his second year of college, Khurma has spent two decades trying to make a billion kids fluent in mathematics.
Ahsan Rizvi
Ahsan Rizvi is the CEO and co-founder of Kiddom, a San Francisco-based education technology platform that has become the first all-in-one solution for high-quality digital curricula in K-12 schools. Born and raised in Pakistan, he came to the US after passing a grueling 1-in-1,100 entrance exam at age 12, an experience that shaped his lifelong commitment to the transformative power of education. After earning degrees in Industrial Engineering and Public Policy from the University of Illinois, he co-founded Kiddom in 2015 with his college friend Abbas Manjee. The company has raised $56.5M in total funding, grown to 220 employees, and now has at least one teacher using its platform in 70% of US schools.
Kevin Zerber
Kevin Zerber is the Founder and CEO of Treering, the edtech company that turned the school yearbook into a personalized, sustainable, and digitally-native experience. Since co-founding Treering in 2009, Zerber has guided the company from a scrappy startup to a platform serving 15,000+ schools across the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand - printing over 11 million yearbooks along the way. With $7.6M in funding backed by notable investors including Rich Barton (Expedia, Zillow) and Mike McCue (Flipboard), and recognition on the 2025 Inc. 5000 list, Zerber has carved out a distinctive niche at the intersection of nostalgia, technology, and inclusivity.
Vaseem Anjum
Vaseem Anjum is a Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur and CEO of Innowi Inc., a Santa Clara-based restaurant technology company delivering all-in-one POS, kiosk ordering, QR code ordering, and kitchen management solutions to restaurants across the US. Before entering the restaurant tech space, he founded SchoolCity Inc. in 1999, an influential K-12 assessment and personalized learning platform that served nearly 2 million students across 140+ districts before merging into Illuminate Education in 2018. With a hardware engineering background spanning National Semiconductor and NEC Electronics, Anjum brings a rare arc from chip design to edtech exit to hospitality software.
Rupa Gupta
Rupa Chandra Gupta is the cofounder and CEO of Sown To Grow, a K-12 edtech platform that puts students in charge of their own learning through goal-setting, progress tracking, and structured reflection. A former Bain consultant turned school administrator, she co-founded the company in 2015 after witnessing firsthand the gap in tools that gave students genuine ownership over their education. Sown To Grow has raised over $5M in venture funding and serves districts across the United States, with measurable outcomes including record-breaking graduation rates in Stockton Unified School District.
Jiayuan Fang
Dr. Jiayuan Fang is the Founder and CEO of Afficient Academy, a Silicon Valley edtech company that uses patented AI-driven adaptive learning to help K-12 students advance a full grade level in 2-5 months. A former UC Berkeley PhD and electrical engineering professor turned serial entrepreneur, Fang previously founded Sigrity Inc., which was acquired by Cadence Design Systems for approximately $80 million in 2012. His pivot to education was sparked by his own three children's experience with inadequate after-school tutoring - leading him to build a platform that identifies not just what students get wrong, but why.
Frances Messano
Frances Messano is CEO of NewSchools Venture Fund, a venture philanthropy that backs early-stage education entrepreneurs across the U.S. A Brooklyn native, first-generation college graduate, and Harvard-trained economist, she left Wall Street (Morgan Stanley equity derivatives) for a decade-long arc through consulting and Teach For America before landing at NewSchools in 2015. She rose to President, built the Diverse Leaders investment strategy, and in January 2023 became the organization's first woman of color to serve as CEO. Under her leadership, NewSchools has deployed $23M+ supporting 80 teams in a single year, with 76% of portfolio companies led by people of color.
Maria Barrera
Maria Barrera is the CEO and co-founder of Clayful, an on-demand chat-based mental health coaching platform that connects K-12 students with certified coaches in under 60 seconds. A Stanford-trained mechanical engineer who immigrated from Colombia at age 10, she moved from aerospace (Boeing, GE) into edtech (Nearpod) before a New York Times article about rising suicide rates in eight-year-olds pushed her to found Clayful in 2021. The company has raised $9.15M in total funding, serves 50+ school districts across six states in 133 languages, and frames mental health as coaching rather than therapy to reduce student stigma.
Shauntel Garvey
Shauntel Garvey is a Co-Founder and General Partner at Reach Capital, a $300M+ San Francisco-based venture firm laser-focused on education technology. A chemical engineer turned edtech investor, she parlayed an MIT degree and a Stanford MBA/MA in Education into backing some of the most consequential learning platforms of the last decade - ClassDojo, Epic, Outschool, and Handshake among them. She co-founded Reach Capital in 2015 after her stint at NewSchools Venture Fund, building it into a firm with 132+ portfolio companies, five unicorns, and one IPO. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, founding member of All Raise, and Pahara Institute Fellow, Garvey is one of the most influential figures at the intersection of capital and educational equity.