Founded with the mission to improve attendance rates for K-12 students, a locally based behavioral-science startup is using artificial intelligence software to drive two-way text messaging chatbots to communicate with families.
Three-year-old edtech AllHere just closed a new funding round valued at $8 million, led by Spero Ventures, to help drive growth and product development. It has taken in $12.1M to date.
The latest funding will go to improving the AI technology behind its chat product.
Founder and CEO Joanna Smith was a Boston charter school teacher prior to founding AllHere.
“I got to see firsthand how attendance challenges can have an impact on children's outcomes. From that, I was inspired to focus on supporting families, at first with human intensive, in-person interventions and support,” Smith said.
When Smith started the company, national data indicated that chronic absenteeism affected around 8 million children a year. That number jumped to about 25 million kids during the pandemic.
Traditionally, most schools nationwide use mailers sent home and at-home visits, in person, to families and students when chronic absenteeism arises. Smith said that analog approach is really hard to scale.
When she transitioned out of teaching, AllHere focused on supporting families with those in-person in human interventions. Then Covid shut down schools, and she recalled having a moment of reckoning and panic because it took in-person interactions away.
This led to the launch of AllHere’s first chatbot that's powered by conversational AI.
AllHere’s data notes that only 6 percent of families access email on a daily basis but around 98% of families are willing to open and answer texts.
The AI-enforced chatbot helps specifically because even if schools have a text platform, they can struggle with implementing personalized conversations at scale.
This past year, the number of schools using AllHere grew by over 700 percent, reaching 8,000 schools across 34 states.
The company houses 30 full-time employees and is looking to double that by the end of this year.
Its business model is on a per-student basis as a function of total enrollment, the per student cost ranges with the low-end cost being $2 per student and the high-end cost at $22 per student.
An earlier version of this story misstated the per-student cost for Allhere.
