Type Private Founded 2014 | Industry Education Area served United States | |
Founders Max Ventilla (CEO)
Bharat Mediratta (CTO) Headquarters San Francisco, United States | ||
AltSchool is an educational startup, founded in 2014.
Contents
Founding
AltSchool's founder and CEO, Max Ventilla, left his previous career at Google in 2013. He wanted to work in education and in 2014 raised $33M of venture capital funding to start AltSchool. The Series A financing was led by Founders Fund and Andreessen Horowitz, with follow-on investment from First Round Capital and Harrison Metal and participation from John Doerr, Jonathan Sackler, Learn Capital, and Omidyar Network.
Series B
In 2015, AltSchool raised a $100M Series B round of funding. The round was led by Founders Fund and Andreessen Horowitz , with Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan also participating through their Silicon Valley Community Foundation.
In 2016, the company hired Coddy Johnson, former executive of video game company Activision.
Schools
The company has created a series of micro schools that focus on personalized learning, where children are involved in setting the projects they work on. Students and teachers create individual "playlists" of tasks and projects for each student. Their progress is streamed to parents using a portal app. By 2016, six schools had been opened in San Francisco, Palo Alto and Brooklyn.
Software platform
AltSchool aims to create a software platform that both private and public schools can use to provide personalized learning in their classrooms. The platform, currently under development, includes both pedagogical and school management features.