Tech
We got an exclusive look at the pitch deck that edtech startup Ignite! Reading used to raise $10 million from Rethink and Citadel founder Ken Griffin
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- Ignite! Reading offers virtual one-on-one tutoring for children to advance their reading level.
- So far, Ignite says students have learned to read 2.4 times faster than before with its lesson plan.
- Now, the startup has raised $10 million in Series A funding to expand into more schools nationwide.
As a 5th grade Teach for America teacher for a public school in the Bronx in 2004, Jessica Sliwerski saw firsthand how important the development of reading skills are at an early age. As she began her first week of classes with her students, she discovered that several of her students had not been taught basic reading skills. “I realized that I was utterly ill-equipped to teach them how to read,” she said.
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This gap in skills is what inspired Sliwerski to found Ignite! Reading, a virtual tutoring startup that helps children from grades K-8 learn how to read through targeted, one-on-one sessions with an online tutor.
The startup’s results with students have attracted the attention of the investors at Rethink Education, and the fund ended up leading its $10 million Series A round. Citadel Founder and CEO Ken Griffin and venture partners from Comcast Ventures, Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, Emergence Capital, Hellman & Friedman and Wing Venture Capital also participated in the round as individual investors.
While other tutoring companies like Varsity Tutors and GoStudent offer online tutoring and reading assistance, Ignite! Reading focuses specifically on teaching children the processes of reading and comprehension, with a main goal of reaching 1st grade students.
After leaving Teach for America, Sliwerski worked in school leadership across NYC as a literacy specialist, and later worked for edtech companies like Lightsail Education and Noodle Markets as an academic advisor. She met with experts and developed a lesson plan that used scientifically-proven techniques to help kids “crack the code of the English language,” she said.
Sliwerski had been working on building out this targeted literacy curriculum when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and she had to pivot to see if this program would work over Zoom. She teamed up with a teacher in a local school in Oakland to modify her curriculum to teach her students how to read virtually, and her outcomes with her students dramatically improved: students were learning to read 2.4 times faster than before using Ignite! Reading’s lesson plan, Sliwerski said.
She decided to partner with serial entrepreneur Evan Marwell, who she had met through her professional connections in the edtech space, to turn her program into a scalable tutoring business for schools across the country.
Through Ignite! Reading, tutors meet with students every day one on one virtually for 15 minutes a day, with a total teaching time of 75 minutes a week. The lessons work as a targeted reading intervention to help with this essential ‘cracking the code’ moment of comprehension, said Sliwerski.
The startup first got a grant for a pilot through Zoom in 2021 to train 30 tutors in the program and teach 100 students, and in two years, the company has grown to now a team of 300 tutors teaching around 2500 students in 7 states.
Sliwerski and Marwell initially envisioned the startup as a nonprofit, but realized that in order to reach the number of kids they wanted to with this tutoring curriculum who have been affected by pandemic learning loss, they would need venture capital resources to quickly and properly scale, Sliwerski said.Ignite! Reading currently has 20 full time employees, said Sliwerski, and plans to use this new funding to scale up its lesson plans and expand into more schools nationwide.
Check out the 9-slide pitch deck that Ignite! Reading used to raise a $10 million Series A round:
Ignite! Reading
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Ignite! Reading
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Ignite! Reading