special-education
(14)
RethinkFirst and the business of making help easier to use
An autism-training company grew into a supplier for clinics, classrooms, and corporate benefits. Its revealing new ambition is to make the machinery of support less exhausting than the problem itself.
MagicSchool AI and the tyranny of the blank box
A former principal saw why teachers were leaving AI untouched: learning another tool was work. MagicSchool turned that problem into a business built around the tasks teachers already had.
At Standard Middle School, belonging has a lunch period
A Bakersfield public school made weekly lunches part of its approach to inclusion. The revealing detail is how much preparation went into something as ordinary as sitting together.
Cambium Bought the Edtech Toolbox. Then It Started Rearranging the Drawers.
The $900 million take-private turned Cambium into a collection of specialist K-12 brands. Its latest move - merging two of the best known - reveals where the house-of-brands strategy bends.
TeachTown Started With Autism Software. The Bigger Business Was the Whole Classroom.
The Woburn-born edtech company found its real market by moving beyond screen time: scripted lessons, physical books, teacher training and automatic data for the students general-ed publishers tend to overlook.
Edupoint Put the Whole School District in One Database. Then Came the Hard Part.
Edupoint sells school districts a seductive idea: one database instead of a thicket of disconnected systems. Its reach, renewal rate and awards show why that pitch works - while one bruising Florida rollout shows exactly what the brochure leaves out.
CentralReach Turned Autism Care’s Paper Problem Into a $1.65 Billion Operating System
A clinician built a way out of paperwork. Thirteen years later, Roper paid about $1.65 billion for the workflow - and for a lesson in how narrow software becomes essential infrastructure.
Say It With Your Eyes
Tobii Dynavox turns eye movements into speech for people who have lost their voice. Here is how a Pittsburgh-and-Stockholm company built the tools that let hundreds of thousands of people be heard.
The Brooklyn Nonprofit Building a One-Stop Village Around Every Child
Yeled V'Yalda began with 78 children. Four decades later, its answer to fragmented family services is a network where preschool, therapy, nutrition and parent support can meet under one institutional roof.
Marker Learning
Marker Learning is a New York-based company that makes learning-disability evaluations more accessible and less time-consuming. Founded by Stefan Bauer and Emily Yudofsky - both diagnosed with dyslexia as children - the company began by bringing remote, lower-cost psychological assessments for conditions like dyslexia and ADHD to families and schools. It has since built an AI-assisted report-writing platform for special education teams and school psychologists that turns referral and assessment documents into structured, citation-backed draft reports, cutting report writing from hours to minutes while keeping clinical judgment with the evaluator.
Scientific Learning, a Carnegie Learning Company
Scientific Learning, now part of Carnegie Learning, builds neuroscience-based reading and language software that rewires how struggling readers process language. Its flagship Fast ForWord program treats reading difficulty at its root - the brain's ability to process sound and sequence information - rather than drilling worksheets. Born from lab research by four scientists in 1996 and acquired by Carnegie Learning in 2020, the company has delivered cognitive-skills and reading interventions to students in more than 40 countries, backed by decades of peer-reviewed research.
Huddle Up
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.
Parallel
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.
MEandMine
MEandMine is a Silicon Valley startup that uses AI and neuroscience-backed games to surface the silent struggles of K-12 students. Its platform delivers ten minutes a day of personalized, gamified skill-building, while an AI engine flags psychological risk by analyzing 160+ in-game behaviors, giving teachers and counselors real-time signals for early intervention.