Why We Invested in Tailor-Ed
By: Yoni Mindel
Tags: Education

Benson Oak Ventures invests with the goal to support big ideas led by visionary and execution-focused entrepreneurs aiming to build transformative companies. We invest through a multi-stage and high-conviction model in our companies. We met Maayan and Yael and were immediately impressed by their passion, smarts and resounding Founder / Market fit for an EdTech venture. We originally met just before they were accepted to Y Combinator and upon their return, had an initial meeting and immediately invited them for a follow-up as we saw two founders with a global vision to impact students, teachers and classrooms under the mission of “reaching every student”.

With years of meaningful experience at the intersection of technology, edtech startups and pedagogy, Maayan and Yael share a tremendous ability to understand the problems in education as well as visualize the solutions, with a clear understanding of the challenges facing education startups, especially around monetization and alignment of interests for education stakeholders.

Maayan and Yael met at Stanford University and bring a unique complement of skills to tackle problems around education. With a degree in Engineering from Israel’s top tech school (Technion), dual MBA and M.Ed degrees from Stanford, plus experience at start-ups BloomBoard and Edmodo, Maayan is keenly familiar with teachers’ struggle to reach every student. With a degrees in computer science (focus on AI and machine learning) an M.A. in Learning, Design and Technology at Stanford’s School of Education Design, and her own experience at Smart Sparrow and another edtech startup, Yael brings the rare combination of raw technical talent with UX and UI that has translated into an early version of the product welcomed by early adopters. They successfully leveraged their experience and product to be accepted into Y Combinator and launched the product, already supporting thousands of students and providing value to students.

Tailor-Ed’s vision is to organize the world’s educational content by efficacy so that every student can get the most effective resource for their needs and understanding. There is a huge (and rapidly growing!) amount of educational content today (Pearson, McGraw Hill) as well as Khan Academy and many more open sources. But there has been great difficulty in closing the loop — of being able to say what content is best to teach which type of students — and assess what is most effective and provides better results. Tailor-Ed is the first company to close this feedback loop for content creators. It’s customizing and tailoring learning to better fit students and at the same time share this understanding with content creators, engendering a more effective virtuous cycle.

They have developed a platform to help teachers create customized lesson plans and curriculum for students. Teachers use Tailor-ED to send short quizzes to assess the students’ needs and then group the students by those needs. Tailor-ED then continuously finds the most effective lesson plan, built from existing educational content, for each student group.

Beyond proficiency — looking at student needs that include motivation, confidence, social aptitude, memory and focus

By leveraging all the education content out there, Tailor-ED provides a far more personalized lesson plan than anyone else out there. The team won the 1st place prize (funds included!) in prestigious PIE Challenge under Israel National Personalization Competition (piechallenge.org.il/en/) in part because an NYU research team found Tailor-ED statistically significantly in improving student achievement.

While having a transformational idea and goal is laudable and the type of journey we at Benson Oak want to support, the heart of the proposition is a financial investment and the ability to make money as a business. Our decision to make this investment was predicated on hours with the team, deep dive into product and — most of all — belief there is a viable business model on which this team can execute.

Seen through our 4 questions approach:

IS IT A B2M² COMPANY? Tailor-ED is addressing a global problem at the heart of education. Their technology enables them to execute across languages already proven by their implementations both in Israel and in the US in Hebrew and English content. Their capabilities of accurately grouping students (learners) according to their needs and then identifying best suited content has applications beyond K-12 in a world that is moving towards self learners and ongoing, independent education. HOW WILL THEY WIN? The team is initially building a community focused on teachers, rather than depending on ads that translate into numbers but weaker foundations. Teachers have the know-how and are pivotal in the engagement of the product with the students. The teachers also provide the gateway to the principals and school buy in. At the same time, the team will approach districts with bottom up data of results and adoption provides the real scale opportunity for the company and reaching a broad range of students. WILL WE ADD VALUE? We understand education is a long term play and requires patience to build a brand, develop and sustain a viable business model. Maayan and Yael are well connected to business and thought leaders around the world, and they have previously raised seed funds from edtech investors such as Emerge Education and as part of this round, Dr. Avraham Kadar, Founder and CEO of leading Edtech company BrainPop is to co-invest and is joining the Board. IS THE BUSINESS MODEL SCALABLE AND SELF-SUFFICIENT. Tailor-Ed has a business model revolving around school buy-in as well as teachers for whom they save significant amount of time and bring efficiencies around preparing class materials. The team is already showing adoption and monetization in Israel — both a valuable market and fantastic testing ground for implementation in the States. We’ve now seen multiple EdTech startups with global visions which have all been able to monetize and get significant traction in Israel — both a tribute to the companies and the forward thinking of schools locally. Integration into a number of Israeli schools under paid subscriptions shows the efficacy of their solution in multiple languages and the deftness to manage multiple revenue models and markets.

Founding a start-up is hard no matter what the field, focusing on EdTech in general is even more challenging and aiming to impact how content is consumed by teachers and schools on a global scale falls under the rubric of ambitious! We are excited to join Maayan and Yael in this journey and strongly believe they have the talent, passion and experience necessary to succeed and we are proud to be lead investors in the Seed Round.