Tailor-ED, a San Francisco-based edtech startup that empowers teachers to reach each student, has raised a $1.6 million seed round led by investment firm Benson Oak Ventures.
A host of investors including Dr. Avraham Kadar, Founder and CEO of BrainPOP, Emerge Education, Elevate Education, FreshFund, Y Combinator and other angel investors also participated in the funding round.
Founded in 2018 by Maayan Yavne and Yael Haramaty, Tailor-ED is the next generation of differentiated instruction helping teachers create lesson plans that are tailored to the needs of students. It aims to help organize the world’s education content by efficacy, so that every student can receive the most effective resources to meet all of their needs. Teachers use Tailor-ED to send short quizzes to assess the students’ needs and then group the students by their needs to create differentiated lesson plans. Tailor-ED then finds the most effective lesson plan, built from existing educational content, for each student group.
Announcing the news and excited with the investment it received, Maayan Yavne, CEO and Co-founder of Tailor-ED, said in a blog post,
“We’re excited to say that we’ve found just the right partners to support us on our journey. We’ve reached a pivotal point where we can focus on scaling Tailor-ED to help teachers reach every student and enable us to leverage our AI technology to ensure that each student receives the most effective learning experience.”
Tailor-ED aims to enable teachers to provide the most engaging and effective learning experiences for their unique classrooms. The company does this by tailoring holistic learning experiences to the needs of the teacher, the classroom and each and every student, and through two core algorithms: (1) Smart grouping algorithm that dynamically creates student groups based on both proficiency and social-emotional student factors. (2) An AI-powered efficacy-based recommendation engine that recommends the most effective resource and instructional strategy for each student group.
Started with just a question one late evening over a coffee, Tailor-ED has grown quickly from prototype to pilots to large scale expansion into schools. Not so long ago, the company only offered math materials for grades three to six. It now covers K-8 math and is been used in more than 1,500 schools worldwide. The company is now planning to add English language art materials soon.
Commenting on the investment, Robert Cohen, Partner at Benson Oak Ventures, said,
“We made the investment because Maayan and Yael have demonstrated what we call Founder Market fit: bringing years of experience from pedagogy, technology and other edtech startups that provide them a competitive advantage to solve this problem.”
On what made him invest in Tailor-ED, Avraham Kadar, Founder and CEO of BrainPOP, said,
“I chose to invest in Tailor-ED because of the stellar, mission-driven team of women founders. We share a commitment to addressing the holistic needs of each individual student and to empowering teachers to lead their classrooms toward strong outcomes for all.”
Maayan Yavne concluded her blog post saying “We’re lucky to be able to leverage both experienced education investors such as Dr. Avraham Kadar along with the twenty years experience in early-stage investing of Benson Oak Ventures to help make the Tailor-ED vision a reality.”
Tailor-ED graduated from the Y Combinator startup accelerator this last March. In July, the company won the first place prize of $280k in the Israel National Personalization Competition, P.I.E Challenge.
