- Ignite! Reading provides one-on-one virtual tutoring for children to advance their reading levels.
- So far, Ignite says that students with its lesson plan have learned to read 2.4 times faster than before.
- Now, the startup has raised $10 million in Series A funding to expand to more schools across the country.
As a 5th grade teacher for a public school in the Bronx in 2004, Jessica Sliversky saw firsthand how important it is to develop reading skills at an early age. As she began her first week of classes with her students, she discovered that many of her students had not been taught basic reading skills. “I realized that I was completely unprepared to teach them how to read,” she said.
It was this difference in skill that inspired Sliversky to found Ignite! Reading, a virtual tutoring startup that helps kids in grades K-8 learn to read through targeted, one-on-one sessions with an online tutor.
The startup’s results with students have attracted the attention of investors in Rethink Education, and the fund led its $10 million Series A round. Citadel founder and CEO Ken Griffin and venture partners 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 such as Varsity Tutors and GoStudent provide online tutoring and reading support, Ignite! Reading focuses specifically on teaching children the process of reading and comprehension with the main goal of reaching first grade students.
After leaving Teach for America, Sliversky worked in school leadership in NYC as a literacy specialist, and later as an academic consultant for edtech companies like LightSail Education and Noodle Markets. They met with experts and developed a lesson plan that used scientifically proven techniques to help children “break the code of the English language”.
Sliversky was working on building this targeted literacy curriculum when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and she had to pivot to see if the program would work on Zoom. She teamed up with a teacher at a local school in Oakland to modify her curriculum to teach her students how to read virtually, and her results with her students improved dramatically: using Student Ignite Learning to read 2.4 times later than before! Reading lesson plans, Sliversky said.
She decided to partner with serial entrepreneur Evan Marvell, whom she met through her professional connections in the edtech space, to turn her program into a scalable tutoring business for schools across the country.
Via Ignite! Reading, tutors meet with students every day for approximately 15 minutes a day, for a total of 75 minutes of teaching time a week. Sliversky states that the texts serve as a targeted reading intervention, which helps to crack this essential ‘code’ of understanding.
The startup first received a grant in 2021 for a pilot through Zoom to train 30 tutors and teach 100 students in the program, and in two years, the company will now have 300 tutors teaching approximately 2500 students across 7 states. A team has been formed.
Sliversky and Marvell initially envisioned the startup as a non-profit, but realized that with this tutoring curriculum they needed to reach the number of children who have been affected by pandemic learning losses quickly and accurately. Will require massive venture capital resources. Sliversky said.Burn! Reading currently has 20 full-time employees, Sliversky said, and plans to use this new funding to grow its lesson plans and expand to more schools across the country.
Behold the 9-slide pitch deck that ignites! Reading raised $10 million Series A round:
Source: www.bing.com
