Scaling Personalized Learning to Achieve Learner Outcomes: Why We Invested in Chalktalk

This article was originally published on LinkedIn.

We are excited to share that we led Chalktalk’s most recent round of financing. We firmly believe in the transformative nature of adaptive learning and its ability to radically transform learner outcomes by personalizing each student’s experience. Chalktalk enables that at scale by deploying its adaptive learning technology to empower teachers to effectively reach students who are most at risk of being left behind.

With ECMC Group's Education Impact Fund, we aim to support companies employing innovation to reduce the inequities in our education system. Chalktalk embodies that mission by partnering with schools to support teachers. Its platform leverages the “I do, we do, you do” model to quickly deploy instructional materials at the whole group, small groups, and finally individual levels that are personalized and adapted to student’s unique needs. Chalktalk saves significant time for teachers by autogenerating lesson planning and slide creations, and provides individualized analytics so teachers can track student’s progress and provide more support as needed.

Most importantly, the organization’s pedagogical approach has been shown to work wonders for students. Driven by multiple states’ ACT or SAT graduation requirements, Chalktalk has helped partner schools demonstrate on average a 2x─6x test score improvement versus the national average—in less than half the time. That has directly led to thousands more students graduating from high school.

As with any early-stage company, this investment has as much to do with the stellar team as the solution. We have had the privilege of getting to know Mo and Eddie over several years, including during their participation in our inaugural Education and Workforce Innovation accelerator cohort. Mo’s personal education journey has always been inspiring and exemplifies his grit and dedication to the cause. After immigrating to the United States from Jordan in high school, Mo majored at Brown University in electrical and computer engineering, and economics, and then founded two education businesses prior to starting Chalktalk. If you spend any time with Mo, will tell you that education has transformed his life and he’s passionate about unlocking the same outcome for others.

Today, Chalktalk serves more than 110,000 students across 450 schools, including several large urban districts with highly diverse student populations such as Miami-Dade and Hillsborough County. During our diligence, we repeatedly heard from customers about the team’s customer-centric approach and their willingness to listen and quickly incorporate feedback into new features. Most importantly, customers consistently highlighted the product’s spectacular outcomes, improving graduation rates of their students and effectively changing lives.

This financing, in which we are proud to partner with Florida Funders, Jurassic Capital, and Nelnet Ventures, will enable Chalktalk to expand its partnerships with schools, develop more features to empower teachers, and further expand into other K12 subjects. We’re excited to be working with Mo and Eddie and the Chalktalk team in this next phase of growth as they continue to support teachers and students toward achieving their goals.