Award-winning literacy solution attracts renowned Silicon Valley investor
NEW YORK, May 6, 2015 – LightSail, the adaptive K-12 literacy solution, today announced both further advances in its personalized learning technology as well as $3.5 million in a new tranche of funding led by Scott Cook, the co-founder and Chairman of the Executive Committee of Intuit.
LightSail is the only truly personalized literacy solution that precisely matches students to reading materials at the ideal level for reading skill gains. Building on the popularity of gamified learning, the company has added numerous motivation and reward features to incentivize students to appropriately challenge themselves and increase reading volumes. In addition, LightSail has added new scaffolds for below-benchmark readers, in order to actively optimize materials for students reading below grade level.
These advances in personalized learning enhance LightSail’s unique market position; the company’s product is the only K-12 literacy solution that:
- Offers more than 80,000 texts from over 400 publishers, complete with assessment questions embedded within every text.
- Measures literacy growth in real time, and automatically adapts each student’s library to continuously deliver “just right” books at the reader’s precise reading level.
- Provides real-time data to students and teachers on a variety of key metrics including reading stamina, comprehension, and reading level growth (measured in Lexile measure).
LightSail’s new features also include personalized word walls to support each student’s vocabulary acquisition and an in-text chat option for reading groups, allowing students to have social media-style dialogues directly in texts.
An overview of LightSail’s features can be viewed at www.lightsailed.com/tour.
Scott Cook and his wife, Signe Ostby, selected LightSail for investment based on their extensive education market research conducted together with the Bridgespan Group. Mr. Cook is a co-founder of Intuit, and his dedication to entrepreneurism at Intuit was featured in Eric Ries’ book The Lean Startup. Ms. Ostby has been involved in education for over two decades, having had leadership roles in several schools from Pre-K to graduate schools.
Mr. Cook and Ms. Ostby were particularly impressed by LightSail’s proven ability to dramatically improve students’ reading ability – even in the most underserved schools – which has led to a market-leading product position after less than 18 months in schools.
“LightSail has developed a truly outstanding product that is head and shoulders above others in the literacy space. I’m delighted to invest in a company with such strong product leadership that builds on technology to dramatically increase the number of kids reading at grade-level,” said Mr. Cook.
LightSail CEO Gideon Stein said, “We are thrilled to add Scott and Signe to our group of investors who care deeply about education and, in particular, the impact that technology can make on improving literacy at scale. Our adaptive product enhancements, which allow schools to powerfully differentiate instruction in a turnkey fashion, will accelerate our strong sales performance to date.”
With this investment, LightSail has raised more than $12 million from a select group of dedicated investors. LightSail, whose partners include the New York City Department of Education, Los Angeles Unified School District, Chicago Public Schools and Denver Public Schools, will use the additional investment to fund expansion of its national sales and marketing platform.
About LightSail Education
LightSail offers K-12 students a truly personalized reading experience while providing educators with the daily data needed to inform instruction and drive deeper learning. LightSail’s literacy software embeds instructional tools and assessments directly into the very best books, delivering instant, actionable data and accelerating student growth. Only LightSail combines content from more than 400 publishers with instructional tools for educators, including formative assessments with every text. With hundreds of schools and hundreds of thousands of students reading on its platform, LightSail is one of the fastest growing literacy solutions in K-12. For more information, visit: www.lightsailed.com
