student-engagement
(22)
Maggie Leen and the Education of an Education Company
A difficult chemistry class once made Maggie Leen doubt whether she belonged in college. Now the Top Hat CEO is betting that better courseware can keep the next student from asking the same question.
Kortext Put the Campus Bookshelf in the Cloud - Then Taught It to Read the Room
A Bournemouth bookseller’s digital bet became a piece of university infrastructure. Now Kortext wants the textbook, the library workflow and the warning light for a struggling student to live on one platform.
Ken Yanhs Keeps Returning to the Classroom
After a career spanning The Atlantic, Bain, WGBH, LEGO Education and a run of software companies, the Boston marketing executive has arrived at Element451 with a familiar brief: make complicated technology useful to people who have better things to do than decode it.
The Career Center Was Full of Answers. uConnect Found the Students Were Somewhere Else.
A nearly empty recruiting event exposed a problem hiding in plain sight: colleges had career resources, but students could not find them. uConnect built the distribution layer - and made engagement the product.
The College CRM That Decided Chatbots Weren’t Doing Enough
Element451 started with an application form. A decade later, it is betting that colleges do not need another dashboard - they need agents that can chase a missing document, answer at midnight and notice when a student goes quiet.
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.
Davina Chan Markets a Place You Have to Experience
At Hart House, the product is not one program or one room. Davina Chan's job is to make a century-old institution feel legible, useful and open to the next student walking through the door.
Unibuddy Built the Wrong Product Twice - Then Universities Gave It a 500-Campus Playbook
The edtech started with a high-school dashboard, tried to build its own marketplace, and kept hearing one awkward question: where is the traffic? Its answer - live inside university websites - turned a student chat idea into an enterprise enrollment platform.
The Startup That Texts College Dropouts Before They Drop Out
Melvin Hines was one of 68 kids in his high school class to graduate. He built Upswing so the other students - the adult learners, the first-gen, the ones nobody texts back - get a fair shot at the finish line.
The Quiz App That Ate 90% of American Schools Just Changed Its Name
Two Indian engineers built a math game nobody could keep fed with content. So they handed the tools to teachers instead - and accidentally built one of the most-used classroom platforms on Earth.
The College Visit Moved to a Phone. This Atlanta Company Got There First.
StudentBridge turns virtual campus tours into enrollments for 250-plus colleges. Its founder is a former race-car driver who thinks admissions offices have been showing recruits the wrong thing.
Atomi
Atomi is a Sydney-based edtech company that runs an online teaching and learning platform for high school. It pairs short, curriculum-aligned videos with interactive quizzes, AI-driven revision recommendations and real-time analytics, serving students, teachers and schools across Australia and the UK. Founded in 2013 as HSC Hub by Rob Barakat and Thomas O'Donahoo, the company now reaches over a million students and teachers and covers hundreds of subjects across all high school year levels.
Excellence
Excellence is a Y Combinator-backed (W25) AI education platform, founded by three Stanford-trained builders, that turns generative AI into a genuine learning tool rather than a homework-answer machine. Designed with teachers, it lets educators generate personalized assignments and exams, create interactive materials, and track student progress, while giving students an AI tutor that asks progressive questions instead of handing over answers. It began as an AI tutor for maths and science aimed at replacing costly private tutoring and long-term programs like Kumon.
Modo Labs
Modo Labs is a Boston-based software company that lets universities and enterprises build branded mobile and web apps without deep engineering teams. Born from an open-source MIT project, its no-code/low-code platform stitches together backend systems - student records, HR, calendars, building controls - into one personalized digital experience for campuses and workplaces. Its Modo Campus and Modo Workplace products serve organizations across 100+ countries, and the company was named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Workplace Experience Applications.
Classkick
Classkick is a Chicago-based education technology company that makes a digital formative-assessment platform where teachers watch students work in real time and give instant feedback. Founded by former Teach for America math teacher and ex-Google/YouTube engineer Andrew Rowland, the tool lets teachers build or import interactive assignments, draw directly on each student's canvas, drop reusable feedback stickers, and auto-grade multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank answers. Students can raise a virtual hand for help - even anonymously - and ask peers. Used by more than 10 million users across all 50 U.S. states and dozens of countries, Classkick's pitch is simple: more tries for kids every day, and less grading busywork for teachers.
EdConnective
EdConnective is a Richmond, Virginia edtech company that delivers virtual-first, one-to-one instructional coaching for teachers, coaches, and school leaders. Founded by Will Morris, it records classroom instruction, has expert coaches analyze the footage, and returns bite-sized, actionable video feedback within about 48 hours - turning district priorities into everyday classroom practice. The company reports roughly 35-40% gains in student engagement, rigor, and content mastery, and pairs its coaching with interactive workshops and PLC facilitation for educator teams.
Super Teacher
Super Teacher is a New York-based edtech company building an AI-powered tutoring app for elementary school students. Founded in 2022 by former Google product manager and NYC math teacher Tim Novikoff, it delivers unlimited, conversational one-on-one tutoring in reading and math for roughly $15 a month - a fraction of the cost of a human tutor. Unlike most AI education tools, Super Teacher avoids large language model guesswork in favor of a deterministic content system designed to always give correct answers. Around 20,000 families have signed up, and public schools in New York, New Jersey, and Hawaii now use the app in classrooms.
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.
Classtime
Classtime is a Zurich- and US-based education technology company building a web-based platform for formative and summative assessments. Teachers use it to create and grade quizzes, run collaborative challenges, and watch student understanding update in real time across any device. Founded in 2016, it serves hundreds of thousands of teachers and learners in more than 60 countries, with a free library of 30,000+ standards-aligned questions and a focus on grounding its design in learning science.
ZeeMee
ZeeMee is a higher education technology platform that bridges the gap between college-bound students and institutions through authentic community and behavioral intelligence. Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Redwood City, California, ZeeMee gives students a social space to showcase their personalities beyond transcripts while giving colleges AI-powered insights that predict enrollment intent with up to 98% accuracy. With 2.6M+ active student users, 300+ institutional partners, and a 4.7-star app rating, ZeeMee has quietly become one of the most influential platforms in college enrollment - helping students find roommates, discover campus culture, and connect with admissions teams before ever setting foot on campus.
Conor Smith
Conor Smith is the CEO of Campus Connect Group, a Miami-based EdTech holding company that acquires, operates, and scales mission-critical software and services for higher education institutions. With an MBA from MIT Sloan and a background in entrepreneurship spanning Southeast Asia and North American software markets, Smith has built Campus Connect into a multi-product platform spanning financial aid, student information systems, enrollment management, and campus operations — serving colleges and universities across the United States.
Vanessa Didyk
Vanessa Roth Didyk is the CEO of ZeeMee, a social platform serving 2.6 million college-bound students across 3,000+ institutions. A serial edtech entrepreneur with 16+ years in the field, she founded Scholar's Station at UC Berkeley, sold it, built a tutoring marketplace at Rev.com, ran MathElf, then took over a struggling ZeeMee in 2018 and turned it into a top-10 App Store social networking app used by roughly 1 in 3 US college freshmen annually.