BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--LearnLaunchX today inducts its first cohort of eight early stage companies into its intensive three-month immersive ed tech accelerator program. The companies were chosen for their exceptional potential to make education more effective, impactful, accessible and affordable across the education continuum.
The first LearnLaunchX session begins today, and includes:
- Listen Edition: Public radio stories, lesson plans and activities that enliven STEM and social studies curriculum, foster critical thinking and listening skills, and align with Common Core State Standards (CCSS), led by respected public radio reporter Monica Brady-Myerov.
- Gradeable: A new assessment and feedback tool that helps teachers give students smarter, faster feedback and reduces their overall workload. Developed by a team from MIT and Harvard, it uses optical character recognition to handle paper inputs in both written answer and multiple choice formats, and provides simple, visually appealing reports.
- Cognii: Using powerful natural language processing technology, Cognii enables automatic assessment of students’ essay answers. Cognii helps learning service providers create personalized and engaging learning environments based on students’ written responses to open-ended questions.
- Empow Learning: Transformative experiences that empower young learners to create and build using technology, to discover their superpowers, and to make lasting contributions to their own futures and to the world around them. Empow is a successful STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and math) afterschool and summer program engaging kids in grades 4-10, which is poised to grow to new communities and regions.
- Createbiz: An online business school and professional development network for the new creative economy. Createbiz delivers affordable and practical, instructor-led online courses and programs designed for the lifestyle of the mobile creative professional. Founded by Dave Kusek, former CEO of the successful online music school Berkleemusic.
- Countdown: A planning tool for creating Common Core-aligned instruction that allows teachers and districts to map standards by day across the school year, link curricular resources, share calendars, manage changes and create a record of what is taught. Countdown improves pacing, increases the effectiveness of co-teaching and supports standards-based teaching and learning.
- eduCanon: Powerful, easy-to-use tools to create on-line direct instruction that links videos, assessments and student interaction, and lets teachers quickly identify and track students' grasp of concepts. Created by teachers, for teachers.
- Intellify Learning: Provides a standards-based instrumentation framework for online course developers and schools, curriculum and learning designers, and ed tech application developers. Led by LearnLaunchX entrepreneur-in-residence Chris Vento, former CTO of Blackboard, WebCT and Cengage, Intellify’s cloud-delivered data and analytics drive the progressive refinement of on-line learning experiences.
Monica Brady-Myerov, Founder of Listen Edition, notes: “LearnLaunchX is an amazing opportunity for me to get the mentoring help I need to take Listen Edition to the next level. I'm thrilled to be a part of LLX because of the array of talent and business experience they will bring to my new company. I'm excited to be part of Boston’s growing EdTech ecosystem, with LearnLaunchX at its center.”
LearnLaunchX is providing a total of $350,000 including seed funding, facilities and infrastructure support, and strategic guidance from LearnLaunchX mentors, a diverse and highly-accomplished team of technology and education entrepreneurs, policy influencers, education channels executives and professional resources. Entrepreneurs work with LearnLaunchX mentors and their fellow entrepreneurs to further hone product and market strategies, forge productive relationships with dominant and emerging channels, and initiate/deepen user engagements. They will emerge from the intensive program ready for next stages of funding, deployment, scale and growth.
"Boston is a natural hotbed for education innovation, and we are delighted that the LearnLaunchX team is providing the leadership to help us grow and scale here,” notes Gradeable Founder and CEO Parul Singh. “We already love our mentors, and can't wait to get started."
Eileen Rudden, LearnLaunchX Partner and Co-Founder, concludes: “We interact with hundreds of entrepreneurs and new companies each year. These startups were carefully selected from a large, highly-competitive pool for their rich potential to help transform education by engaging and empowering learners and educators, and enabling institutions to navigate change and pressing challenges. As LearnLaunchX alumni, they’ll be poised to scale, grow and emerge as both successful businesses and education innovation leaders.” Rudden served as the Chicago Public School System’s Chief Officer, College and Career Preparation. A Broad Fellow, she is deeply engaged with education system improvements at the national, state and local level. She previously led large divisions of Fortune 100 companies IBM and Avaya.
About LearnLaunchX:
LearnLaunchX is an ed tech-focused accelerator dedicated to growing great education companies, and is based in the Boston area, often referred to as the world’s education capital. It provides select companies with seed funding, workspace, an unmatched team of mentors with deep domain experience and relationships, direct access to the learning marketplace and strategic advantages in navigating successive funding, growth, market entry and exit cycles.
