Paper is a Montreal-based education technology company that contracts with K-12 public school districts to give students unlimited, 24/7 access to live online tutoring, writing feedback, and college-and-career planning tools at no cost to families. Founded in 2014 as GradeSlam, it scaled to serve millions of students across hundreds of districts, reached unicorn status with a 2022 Series D, then weathered a sharp contraction in 2024 as pandemic-era school funding dried up.
Room to Read is a global nonprofit working to create a world free from illiteracy and gender inequality. Founded in 2000 after a Microsoft executive's trek through Nepal, it partners with communities and governments to build foundational literacy in early grades and to support girls through secondary school with life-skills and mentorship. As of 2024 it reports reaching more than 50 million children across 28 countries.
Dr. Geetha Murali is the chief executive officer of Room to Read, the global literacy and girls' education nonprofit headquartered in San Francisco. The first non-founder CEO of the organization, she leads a team of roughly 1,200 staff across 29 countries and a network of more than 20,000 partners and volunteers. Under her watch, Room to Read's programs have reached over 60 million children. A PhD in South Asian politics with a master's in biostatistics, she frames her work through a personal lens: her mother was nearly a child bride, and her family's trajectory shifted in a single generation.
BookNook is a K-8 high-impact tutoring company that pairs a synchronous virtual classroom with research-based reading and math curriculum, delivered by vetted tutors to schools and districts across the United States. Its platform earned an ESSA Tier 1 evidence rating and has served more than 250,000 students.
Kelsey Piper is an American journalist and effective altruism advocate best known for her work at Vox's Future Perfect newsletter, where she spent seven years covering AI safety, global catastrophic risks, evidence-based philanthropy, and education policy. She broke major stories including OpenAI's non-disparagement agreements and conducted the first post-collapse interview with Sam Bankman-Fried. In August 2025, she left Vox to co-found The Argument, a Substack newsletter focused on reasoned policy debate. A Stanford Symbolic Systems graduate who pledged 30% of her lifetime income to charity, Piper brings a rare combination of technical fluency, ethical rigor, and accessibility to some of the most consequential questions of our time.