“Exceptional preparation for the Common Core.”

Investment Amount : $50,000  |  Year : 2012  |  Sector: Education  | City: Washington D.C.

The Challenge:

Teachers often work in isolation, creating duplicate educational content for their classrooms of varying quality. Without adequate communication and collaboration, teachers re-create the wheel. At best, this is merely a waste of time. At worst, the best teachers’ work is limited to his or her single classroom while other teachers lead lessons that are less-than their peers. As teachers adopt their curricula to align with the new Common Core State Standards, there is even more incentive to work together to create the best educational resources and share them with colleagues and peers.

The Innovation:

LearnZillion (founded 2011) provides resources for educators to share best practices and empower teachers to collaborate. LearnZillion.com offers a free and growing set of Math and English Language resrouces for grades 2-12 that have been developed by expert teachers directly from the CCSS. LearnZillion’s premium participatory curriculum platform enables schools and districts to accelerate the successful implmenttion of the Common Core, augment the efficacy of their coaches, create classtime capacity to address differentiation needs, and build teacher leaders.

The Impact:

With SVF’s $50K investment (as a portion of a $2.4M round), LearnZillion continued to build the free product and grow adoption. Since SVF’s investment, the company has raised an additional round of capital, bringing the sum total of VC financing to $9.4M. With this most recent round, the funds were focused on hiring executive-level managers and building the premium product.