Introducing the New edinno.lab Cohort!
We are excited to announce that the latest iteration of our Innovation Lab, edinno.lab | Product Market Fit, has officially begun! After carefully considering an extensive list of qualified applicants, we have selected a dynamic cohort of 9 early-stage edtech startups to participate in the first edinno.lab focused specifically on finding product market fit in the edtech industry. We’re proud to introduce the companies in this cohort: 2 Thrive Ed, Brazen Learning, Bridges, Carousel, Integrate School, LRNKEY, PopPD, Schoolio Learning Inc., and TeeRead.
This new lab experience is a 4-week program, this session running from April 4th through May 1st, with three live sessions each week. edinno.lab | Product Market Fit is for early stage edtech founders who are interested in building foundational knowledge specific to education technology and finding product market fit in the industry. Labs are developed to reflect the stages of the Founder Learning Journey, and edinno.lab | Product Market Fit focuses on preliminary product market fit research.
See more about getting involved as a participant, supporter, and friend at the end of this post!
Now let’s read more about each of these 9 startups with their unique goals and values…
- 2 — Thrive Ed
Company Name: 2 Thrive Ed
Founder(s): Jay Bryant, Marc Monseau, Theresa MiMasi, and Sue Collins
Year founded: 2021
Company Description: 2 Thrive Ed’s product seeks to be a mobile app that enables teachers to explore their well-being, choose an area of focus for elevating their well-being, and get support through coaching, peer groups, and digital engagement to adopt that behavior. We plan for our fully-integrated transformative wellness platform to combine assessments, microlearning, expert-led virtual workshops, and support — group or 1:1 coaching.
Unique Value: We want to be the only app and platform that focuses on teacher wellness first. We seek to improve teacher retention while being respectful of teachers’ time commitment. Rooted in science-backed, proven effective research. The content base comes from 20 years of research, science, and development. We are creating a learning environment where teachers and students can thrive.
Current Goals: 1.) Create a MVP to show the micro-learning user experience for teachers by May 1, 2022. 2.) Start a pilot project with 30 teachers in 3 different school districts by Sep 1, 2022. 3.) Raise initial funding for development, marketing, sales and operational costs by October 1, 2022.
Company Name: Brazen Learning
Founder(s): Brendan Heyck and Girija Ramapriya
Year founded: 2019
Company Description: edtech company focused on products that create infrastructure and community for education stakeholders.
Unique Value: Brazen Learning’s Student Soapbox engages students by tearing down barriers to collaborative lesson planning.
Current Goals: Our vision includes being able to have schools share a growing, high-quality, teacher- and admin-vetted lesson and material library, that provides new teachers, and those teaching in resource-lacking areas, great, engaging lessons for their students, reducing opportunity gaps and increasing educational equity across the States.
Company Name: Bridges
Founder(s): Stephanie Tavares
Year founded: 2022
Company Description: We are building Bridges to be a DEI education and campus management platform that combines education and data to transform colleges and universities into truly diverse, equitable, and inclusive spaces.
Unique Value: Bridges will help Chief Diversity Officers to go beyond the compliance to transform historically exclusive spaces into inclusive spaces.
Current Goals: To run anti-racism pilot trainings at two schools this summer to validate that admin and students want to do deep DEI work. Also to begin developing our platform both technically but also through media.
Company Name: Carousel
Founder(s): Joe Ewing
Year founded: 2021
Company Description: We’re building a gamified social-emotional learning (SEL) platform for K-12 education. We liken Carousel to the “Duolingo of SEL” in that our platform converts any SEL or SEL-type content into fun, asynchronous lessons and activities that students and staff can access on their smartphones. Anytime, anywhere.
Unique Value: Carousel aggregates any SEL-type content into an easy-to-use, scalable, cost-effective, and data-driven platform to help K-12 schools create SEL culture and maximize student success.
Current Goals: Personally, I’d like to get laser focused on priorities, and ignore distractions. Professionally, I’d like to be able to conduct effective customer discovery calls and have a clear path to product market fit for Carousel.
Company Name: Integrate School
Founder(s): Kevin Celisca and Maxwell Witt
Year founded: 2015
Company Description: Integrate School helps admins and teachers to save time on the lesson planning process by making it easier to create, share, and provide feedback to lesson plans while mapping them to state standards. We ensure the quality and transparency of lessons taught which ultimately leads to significant time savings and improved student performance.
Unique Value: We offer a systematic approach to preparing and standardizing lesson plans by improving administrative processes through automation, greater transparency into effectiveness through data, and strategic integrations. Systemic inequity in instructional programs prevents students from receiving a comparable education, within a district, school and often the same grade. This inequity is most clearly evident in the quality of a school program’s lesson plans, which are misaligned, inconsistent and riddled with instructional bias as most schools use email and google docs to manage this process. The impact is overworked teachers and underserved students.
Current Goals: To get to 20 paying customers by the end of 2022 for a total ARR of $100k.
Company Name: LRNKEY
Founder(s): Hayrapet Hambardzumyan, Hayk Hovhannisyan, Gohar Pedanyan, and Narek Sahakyan
Year founded: 2019
Company Description: LRNKEY is on a mission to connect people and create a globalized educational and one-on-one online tutoring marketplace that aims to build skills in 25+ focus areas.
Online courses, videos, and books are great, but sometimes we all need a real person to guide us when questions arise. If so, online private tutors will surely help you out. This is where we rely on our amazing tutors to coach, mentor, and support learners in their journey.
Unlike current solutions like PDF, Google Docs, and Canva files, we provide course creators with the opportunity to see student responses and track their learning dynamics for each particular worksheet. And students don’t need to download or print worksheets, they can fill them out online.
Unique Value: Affordable personalized learning across the globe
Current Goals: We have tested various marketing channels and have identified the one that works, and we are now replicating that model at various niches and scales. We need coaching and investments to multiply the size and scale of the tests to confirm our hypothesis and target more geographical locations.
Company Name: PopPD
Founder(s): Alissa McDonald and Megan Kensington
Year founded: 2022
Company Description: PopPD is a professional development marketplace for teachers, by teachers. We will host a platform for passionate teacher leaders (our PopPD coaches) to sell workshops, cohort-style courses, and membership-style clubs to other educators around the world.
Unique Value: Traditional PD is typically boring, expensive, inaccessible, and out-of-date. PopPD will offer teachers the opportunity to access a variety of relevant, actionable, and enjoyable PD offerings from anywhere.
Current Goals: To mobilize 10,000 teacher leaders to share their unique expertise and create lasting change in education as coaches on our site.
Company Name: Schoolio Learning Inc.
Founder(s): Sathish Bala, Yan Katcharovski, and Lindsey Cassleman
Year founded: 2019
Company Description: We are building a platform that connects classrooms to kitchen tables. The Schoolio OS will connect parents, teachers and tutors to provide insight, learning personalization and 360 views to support the student needs. With a connected touchpoint and when everyone is on the same page, we believe education can be tailored to inspire and impact.
Unique Value: We are building an educational metaverse combining core curriculum and interest-based units in a choose your own adventure model for K12. We believe with academic choices, students own their outcomes. Through Schoolio, students will love to learn again.
Current Goals: Launch and grow our subscription base to 10k by end of 2022, fine-tune our b2b strategy, idea validation, find new partners
Company Name: TeeRead
Founder(s): Trini Bensusan Mille
Company Description: TeeRead uses AI and speech recognition to solve education’s biggest problem — reading.
We help teachers assess their students’ reading automatically while providing students with a personalized library of books at their specific reading level.
We want to make our literacy crisis a problem of the past!
Unique Value: We seek to be the only edtech that makes personalized literacy instruction for every student possible for innovative and passionate teachers in a world where more technology doesn’t mean less work.
As you can see, all of these companies have big ideas for where change is possible. With this lab experience, they will be able to focus on the value proposition they can bring to market.
About edinno
edinno is an open learning community created to support and empower emerging edtech innovators.
We’re on a mission to democratize access to information and social capital, making founding an edtech company more accessible to all.
Get Involved
Interested in learning more about the edinno.lab? Fill out the interest form here or reach out with questions. Want to get involved as a partner, expert, or supporter? Send us a note.
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