Emerge Education

GSV Ventures is a multi-stage venture capital firm investing in the most important founders and leaders across the global “Pre-K to Gray” digital learning and workforce skills landscape. Investments include ClassDojo, Clever (exited), Coursera, Degreed, Gradescope (exited), Guild, Learneo (formerly Course Hero), Nearpod (exited), PhotoMath (exited), Physicswallah and QuillBot (exited) amongst other notable investments in education technology leaders positioned to achieve disproportionate gains. GSV Ventures manages over $1.0bn in assets across three funds and several SPVs, and partners include Michael Cohn, Adam Freed, Jason Horne, Michael Moe, Luben Pampoulov, Deborah Quazzo and Tiffany Taylor. Critical platforms for GSV Ventures’ investing activity also include the All Eyes on India Summit and the world-renowned ASU+GSV Summit, drawing some of the globe’s most prominent speakers including Tencent Co-founder and Yidan Prize founder, Charles Chen; Stanford Dean, Dan Schwartz, Bill Gates, Sheryl Sandberg, Colorado Governor Jared Polis, Sal Khan, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Arne Duncan, Bari Weiss, Mitch Kapor and Freada Kapor Klein, Sheryl Lee Ralph, amongst many, many others.

JFF Ventures is building a future where innovative products and solutions give everyone increased access to learning, employment, and economic advancement opportunities. We do this through: Connections: Our network of forward-thinking corporate leaders is committed to helping entrepreneurs grow their businesses and deepen their impact. Community: Our portfolio companies are part of a community of impact-oriented leaders focused on creating opportunity for learners and workers. Investments: Our investments in early-stage companies and entrepreneurs help build inclusive technology solutions. JFF Ventures marks a major expansion of JFF’s growing focus on technology investing and acceleration, building on the organization’s 2019 acquisition and incubation of the Employment Technology Fund in JFFLabs (ETF@JFFLabs). JFF has already invested in more than 35 high-impact technology startups through ETF@JFFLabs, now JFF Ventures Fund I.

ECMC Foundation is a national foundation working to improve postsecondary outcomes for students from underserved communities. ECMC Foundation makes investments in two focus areas: college success and career readiness; and uses a spectrum of funding structures, including strategic grantmaking and program-related investments, to invest in both nonprofit and for-profit ventures. Launched in 2018, ECMC Foundation’s Education Innovation Ventures (EIV) program provides catalytic, risk capital to early-stage ventures working to increase postsecondary educational outcomes and economic mobility among learners who face systemic barriers. Through program-related investments, EIV’s capital generates impact alongside financial returns, which are recycled to fund further impact initiatives and drive changes in educational attainment and economic mobility for learners. Investment Strategy and Objectives EIV provides flexible, risk capital to early-stage ventures and entrepreneurs working to seed innovations, prove new models, and enable ventures to scale their impact. Our early-stage investments are designed to support ventures focused on improving postsecondary persistence and completion and/or job attainment at family-sustaining wages, specifically for learners and jobseekers who face systemic barriers to economic mobility. Since launching in 2018, EIV’s investments have allowed the Foundation to tap into the creative power of the nonprofit and for-profit sectors through social enterprises working on college persistence and success, alternative postsecondary education financing, career exploration, upskilling and training, and equitable hiring initiatives. The investment thesis builds upon learnings from the Foundation’s grantmaking portfolios on College Success and Career Readiness. EIV makes several types of investments: Direct Investments: the Foundation invests capital into social enterprises that serve learners and jobseekers Fund Investments: capital is deployed to funds that reinvest capital into social ventures Donor Advised Funds (DAF) Investments: capital is sent through a donor advised fund and invested into social ventures Education Innovation Venture’s Five-Point Model EIV considers ventures that demonstrate a commitment to delivering intentional, sustained and measurable social impact, and align with the Foundation's mission of inspiring and facilitating improvements in postsecondary education for underestimated learners. We look for the following criteria in our investments: Impact: A measurable strategy for driving educational outcomes and economic mobility for students from underserved backgrounds and markets; a commitment to sharing lessons learned with the greater education sector. Risk & Innovation: Early-stage ventures with transformative and disruptive products and services that address an unmet market need. Scalability: Ventures with sustainable business models using market-based approaches that need access to patient capital in order to achieve scale. Leverage: Ventures that test new and bold ideas with the potential to attract additional sources of capital to grow impact. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion: Intentionality around building a diverse and inclusive body of leadership and practicing strong internal social governance. Special Initiative: Innovative Financing Models Beginning in 2021, ECMC Foundation will invest up to $2.5 million through Education Innovation Ventures into short-term training and education programs that use alternative financing models to accelerate the upskilling and retraining needed for America’s unemployed workforce to find gainful employment and attain family-sustaining wages. Learn more about why we are investing in Innovative Financing Models.

We believe in innovative education to prepare current and future generations for the challenges of the 21st century. We believe that social impact and financial performance are intimately correlated in a virtuous dynamic: for products and services to be used or purchased over and over again, they must bring a meaningful positive impact to their users. We evaluate our funding opportunities using a risk-return-impact model. We believe in diversity to create a more inclusive world: we invest in teams who better reflect the diversity of human beings they serve. How we define impact We are convinced that for Edtech & Future of Work products to succeed in the long term, they must improve learning outcome and be available to the greatest number of learners and workers. We measure the social impact of Edtech start-ups by evaluating how much they benefit our society. We have defined our own proprietary methodology which evaluates Reach, Inclusion and Learning Outcome. These are the three key objectives that we track in order to fund projects that are sustainable and can be widely adopted. Creating a better world We believe that education plays a central role in development and is the bedrock for the realization of other rights. We contribute to 8 of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the UN and are signatory & member of various renowned sustainable organizations.

We are committed to establishing productive, supportive and engaging relationships with our portfolio companies to help them think innovatively, scale outcomes and generate competitive returns. In addition to direct investments, we also invest in and partner with other mission-driven education investors.

Roble Ventures is an early stage venture capital firm working to foster equitable human progress. 80% of our companies are co-founded b women or underrepresented founders. We invest in entrepreneurs building human enablement technologies and have a proven playbook that has helped entrepreneurs generate over $8B in market value (3 unicorns) by following a mission-driven approach that fosters human progress. Some companies in our portfolio: Udemy, Kahoot, Adaptive Insights.