UPchieve, the free, 24/7 online tutoring and college counseling app for low-income students, announced Thursday it’s giving teachers in Title 1 middle schools and high schools a new tool to ensure their students get the academic support they need.
The new offering, called “UPchieve for Teachers,” allows teachers to offer 1:1 support to their students. They can invite students to sign up for tutoring, create classes, and monitor students’ platform usage. Previously, students had to sign up for tutoring services themselves, but with this new product, teachers can now recommend students for 1:1 tutoring at no cost. In the coming weeks, they’ll also be able to assign tutoring sessions to entire classes.
UPchieve for Teachers is available to educators working in Title 1 middle schools and high schools. Title 1 is a federal aid program provided to K-12 schools with the highest number of low-income families within school districts. Approximately 43% of public schools qualify for Title I funding, with fewer than 50,000 schools benefiting from the program.
This new offering is expected to help UPchieve expand its user base by reaching students who may not be aware of free services like this or who may not be actively seeking additional assistance.
“The product is going to be really valuable to teachers because it’s going to help them accomplish some of the hardest parts of their job,” founder Aly Murray told TechCrunch. “Students are coming into the class with different gaps in their foundational skills. Teachers have to try to support all of their students, but there’s not enough time to support each student individually, so that’s a natural place where a tutor can help. We’re really excited about launching a product that’s going to give teachers more control.”
UPchieve was founded in 2016, shortly after Murray graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. As a former low-income student herself, she struggled to access academic support services throughout her schooling and wanted to make it easy for other students to be able to get help whenever they needed it, even when working on homework late at night.
“I was raised by a single mom, and as an immigrant to the United States, she often wasn’t able to help me with schoolwork and with my college applications. And so that had a big impact on my life. It made things very difficult, and I found that I often needed help late at night when there was really nowhere I could turn to for support,” Murray said.
UPchieve says it has matched over 190,000 tutoring requests from more than 20,000 students across all 50 states. Its 24/7 online tutoring sessions are conducted in the in-app messenger or via voice chat on the web or mobile app. UPchieve covers over 30 subjects, including math, science, English, history, humanities, and more.
Tutors can volunteer by signing up on the website. Volunteers can even be students themselves; however, they must be in 9th grade or higher. UPchieve currently has around 2,400 tutors active on the platform.
“All of the volunteers on UPchieve go through a background screening, training, and certification process to become a volunteer tutor. Before they’re ever going to work with a student, they have to pass a quiz in every subject that they want to help students with,” Murray explained.
Similar to other edtech companies, the company utilizes OpenAI’s GPT-4o to assist tutors in providing AI-generated feedback and progress reports to students after the sessions are over. In the future, the company also plans to use AI to help tutors create practice problems and offer AI-generated summaries of student sessions through its Teachers product.
“We have no plans to replace our human tutors with AI tutors anytime in the near future,” Murray added.
As a nonprofit organization, UPchieve relies on charitable donations, grants, and paid partnerships with schools, districts, and corporations. Donors include Atlassian, AT&T, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Guggenheim Capital, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, the Skyline Foundation, and Verizon.
UPchieve has partnered with over 50 schools, and each school or organization pays a $10,000 partnership fee per year. The company also graduated from Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 batch.
In 2023, UPchieve raised over $4 million through philanthropy and earned revenue from paid partnerships. The company claims its annual recurring revenue (ARR) is currently $840,000, which comes solely from paid partnerships.
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Parents understand the challenge of keeping young kids engaged in online learning. Nurture is a new app designed for children aged 4 to 7 that features interactive content and games to capture their interest. The company’s mission is to equip children with critical life skills such as socializing, basic financial understanding, mindfulness, fitness, nutrition, and more through story-based adventures that kids can actively participate in.
Nurture announced Wednesday its $2.8 million pre-seed round, led by Golden Gate Ventures. The funding will go toward bringing on preschool content creators to help develop content for the platform.
The flagship title that Nurture first launched is called “Doki’s Delivery” and is focused on helping kids learn social-emotional skills. The series follows a group of characters who are on a mission to deliver an egg in a spaceship.
The app also has a dual-screen component that requires parents to download the Nurture TV app on Fire TV or Google TV so kids can interact between both screens. For “Doki’s Delivery,” kids can use their phone or tablet as a game controller while playing on the TV screen. They can tilt the mobile device from side to side to help the characters avoid obstacles.
Other interactions include answering a call from the main character, designing the spaceship, and hatching the mysterious egg, which players can then take care of– similar to Tamagotchi, the popular kids’ toy.
“I didn’t want to make it passive, mindless screen time. I want to make it an active, interactive learning experience,” co-founder and CEO Roger Egan told TechCrunch. “[Once kids] get the concepts, then we use the games and interactives to practice the skills and apply them.”
The company plans to release new original content focusing on “growth mindset and financial thinking,” as explained by Egan. Additionally, Nurture is in discussions with around 20 popular third-party creators to enhance its content library. Nurture’s creator platform enables creators to host content on their own digital “islands,” which users can access by swiping through the app menu.
In addition to the immersive learning content, parents will have the ability to track their kids’ performance in the games.
“We have these things called reflection moments where we ask questions, and the child can answer… With that answer, we can synthesize that information and understand how well do they understand the concept, and then feed that back into the product and report to parents about how they’re learning and showing progress,” Egan said.
There will also be offline activities to provide parents with ideas on how they can reinforce the concepts learned in the app and encourage children to apply their knowledge in everyday situations.
Nurture was founded in 2022, a few years after Egan’s kids started remote learning during the pandemic. Having a front-row seat to his children’s education, he believed that traditional schooling doesn’t adequately prepare kids for the rapidly changing world, especially one powered by AI. In his opinion, children should also learn things like adaptability, critical thinking, digital literacy, mindfulness, and empathy to thrive in the future. However, he struggled to find suitable alternatives to complement his kids’ education.
Egan previously founded the online grocer RedMart, which was acquired by Alibaba. He is joined by co-founders Danny Limanseta (chief product officer), who served as product design lead at Redmart; Sally Doherty (chief people officer), who previously worked at Microsoft; and Scott and Julie Stewart (chief creative officers), a husband and wife team who specialize in children’s animated content, such as “Lego Friends: The Next Chapter.”
In addition to Priebe being an investor, he’s also a game design advisor for Nurture. Priebe was responsible for creating Club Penguin, an incredibly popular multiplayer online game.
“The next generation of kids are picking up games faster than watching a show,” Priebe told us. “I really like the idea of you’re not just going to sit there and watch linear TV anymore…It’s really novel, how the [Nurture] characters stop and bring the kid into the adventure, and they’re like, ‘Now, what would you do?’ or ‘How would you want us to do this?’”
Currently, Nurture is an invite-only beta available for users in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada. It plans to expand to other markets in 2025. The company will also launch a paid subscription once the app is open to the public.
Other participants in the round include Reach Capital and Seedcamp, with participation from Club Penguin co-founder Lance Priebe. Other notable advisors include Manual Bronstein, Roblox’s chief product officer; Scott Kraft, former lead writer and executive producer of “Paw Patrol”; and Joey Mazzarino, the puppeteer on “Sesame Street” known for his roles as Murray Monster, Stinky the Stinkweed, and other Muppets.
Keep reading the article on Tech Crunch
Parents understand the challenge of keeping young kids engaged in online learning. Nurture is a new app designed for children aged 4 to 7 that features interactive content and games to capture their interest. The company’s mission is to equip children with critical life skills such as socializing, basic financial understanding, mindfulness, fitness, nutrition, and more through story-based adventures that kids can actively participate in.
Nurture announced Wednesday its $2.8 million pre-seed round, led by Golden Gate Ventures. The funding will go toward bringing on preschool content creators to help develop content for the platform.
The flagship title that Nurture first launched is called “Doki’s Delivery” and is focused on helping kids learn social-emotional skills. The series follows a group of characters who are on a mission to deliver an egg in a spaceship.
The app also has a dual-screen component that requires parents to download the Nurture TV app on Fire TV or Google TV so kids can interact between both screens. For “Doki’s Delivery,” kids can use their phone or tablet as a game controller while playing on the TV screen. They can tilt the mobile device from side to side to help the characters avoid obstacles.
Other interactions include answering a call from the main character, designing the spaceship, and hatching the mysterious egg, which players can then take care of– similar to Tamagotchi, the popular kids’ toy.
“I didn’t want to make it passive, mindless screen time. I want to make it an active, interactive learning experience,” co-founder and CEO Roger Egan told TechCrunch. “[Once kids] get the concepts, then we use the games and interactives to practice the skills and apply them.”
The company plans to release new original content focusing on “growth mindset and financial thinking,” as explained by Egan. Additionally, Nurture is in discussions with around 20 popular third-party creators to enhance its content library. Nurture’s creator platform enables creators to host content on their own digital “islands,” which users can access by swiping through the app menu.
In addition to the immersive learning content, parents will have the ability to track their kids’ performance in the games.
“We have these things called reflection moments where we ask questions, and the child can answer… With that answer, we can synthesize that information and understand how well do they understand the concept, and then feed that back into the product and report to parents about how they’re learning and showing progress,” Egan said.
There will also be offline activities to provide parents with ideas on how they can reinforce the concepts learned in the app and encourage children to apply their knowledge in everyday situations.
Nurture was founded in 2022, a few years after Egan’s kids started remote learning during the pandemic. Having a front-row seat to his children’s education, he believed that traditional schooling doesn’t adequately prepare kids for the rapidly changing world, especially one powered by AI. In his opinion, children should also learn things like adaptability, critical thinking, digital literacy, mindfulness, and empathy to thrive in the future. However, he struggled to find suitable alternatives to complement his kids’ education.
Egan previously founded the online grocer RedMart, which was acquired by Alibaba. He is joined by co-founders Danny Limanseta (chief product officer), who served as product design lead at Redmart; Sally Doherty (chief people officer), who previously worked at Microsoft; and Scott and Julie Stewart (chief creative officers), a husband and wife team who specialize in children’s animated content, such as “Lego Friends: The Next Chapter.”
In addition to Priebe being an investor, he’s also a game design advisor for Nurture. Priebe was responsible for creating Club Penguin, an incredibly popular multiplayer online game.
“The next generation of kids are picking up games faster than watching a show,” Priebe told us. “I really like the idea of you’re not just going to sit there and watch linear TV anymore…It’s really novel, how the [Nurture] characters stop and bring the kid into the adventure, and they’re like, ‘Now, what would you do?’ or ‘How would you want us to do this?’”
Currently, Nurture is an invite-only beta available for users in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada. It plans to expand to other markets in 2025. The company will also launch a paid subscription once the app is open to the public.
Other participants in the round include Reach Capital and Seedcamp, with participation from Club Penguin co-founder Lance Priebe. Other notable advisors include Manual Bronstein, Roblox’s chief product officer; Scott Kraft, former lead writer and executive producer of “Paw Patrol”; and Joey Mazzarino, the puppeteer on “Sesame Street” known for his roles as Murray Monster, Stinky the Stinkweed, and other Muppets.
Keep reading the article on Tech Crunch