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.
Cartwheel is a Cambridge, Massachusetts company that delivers evidence-based mental health care to K-12 students through their schools. Working as a telehealth partner to school districts, it provides rapid-access individual therapy, group therapy, psychiatric evaluations, medication management, and family and parent guidance, with most care covered by insurance. By 2026 it had grown to roughly 350 school districts across 15 states, positioning itself as the largest school-based mental health telehealth provider in the United States.
Huddle Up (formerly DotCom Therapy) partners with K-12 school districts to deliver high-quality speech therapy, occupational therapy, mental health, and school psychology services for students with IEPs. Combining licensed providers in all 50 states with a proprietary technology platform, the company offers both virtual and in-person care to close special-education staffing gaps. Founded in 2015 to reach students in remote Alaska, it has delivered more than 1 million therapy sessions and now serves close to 1,000 school districts nationwide.
Wayfinder is a K-12 edtech company that builds a PreK-12 platform for purpose-driven learning, combining research-backed social-emotional and life-readiness curriculum, MTSS-ready resources, and real-time insights. Born out of Stanford's d.school K12 Innovation Lab, it helps students develop durable, future-ready skills like purpose, belonging, adaptability and collaboration, and is used across thousands of schools and districts.
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.
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.
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.
Zūm is a Redwood City, California company that has reinvented the most analog corner of education: the yellow school bus. It pairs an AI-driven routing and fleet-management platform with apps for parents, drivers and districts, then layers on a fast-growing fleet of electric buses with vehicle-to-grid charging that can sell power back to the grid. Serving roughly 4,500 schools and districts nationwide, Zūm turned a clipboard-and-radio industry into a connected, electrified mobility network.
Daybreak Health is a school-based teletherapy provider building the first digital mental health system for youth. The Y Combinator-backed company partners with public school districts across the United States to deliver personalized, clinically-validated mental health care to students - including teletherapy, on-site clinicians, classes, and universal screeners. As of 2023 it served more than one million students across 60+ districts and reported 81% of students showed symptomatic or behavioral improvements.
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.