Dario Calogero’s investment thesis is simple: He looks for technology companies that are willing to land in emerging markets around the world.
That led the Italian tech investor and entrepreneur to his LinkedIn feed, where he saw a post from Sunny Zhang, a founder at Houston-based educational tech startup TrueLeap. Intrigued, Calogero met with Zhang and her co-founder, Sandip Bordoloi, and went on to lead a pre-seed investment for the company.
“The first through 10th things I look at for a startup company is the team,” Calogero said in an interview with the Houston Business Journal. “My experience is that, typically, an early-stage startup changes the business model a few times before we get into the scale-up phase. I found both Sunny and Sandip [Bordoloi] very motivated, very knowledgeable about what they’re doing, and very much focused on in this operation.”
Calogero previously founded communications platform company Kaleyra SpA and served as its CEO until it was acquired by Indian telecommunications giant Tata Communications last year. He now serves on TrueLeap’s board of directors.
TrueLeap produces a digital content platform that combines learning management and content management as well as other features needed to run classes. The company differentiates itself from other platforms such as Blackboard by targeting schools in areas without sufficient digital infrastructure. The company operates in the U.S., India and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, expanding to the latter country in 2023.
Sandip Bordoloi, TrueLeap’s CEO and co-founder, said the company was looking internationally for investors to avoid some of the hurdles they might face in Texas or the U.S.
“His understanding of the risks and uncertainties of early-stage ventures made it a very natural fit from a knowledge perspective,” Bordoloi told the HBJ in an emailed statement. “His knowledge of emerging markets is exemplary, and he understood our market emphasis and growth plans without having to provide the often needed background information. In our experience, U.S.-based, especially Texas-based investors often perceive emerging markets as higher risk, which is often a hurdle for alignment.”
Bordoloi confirmed that TrueLeap will be seeking more capital this year to help fund programs in Africa and Asia. The company is currently onboarding over 90,000 students in Congo through its long-term contracts and plans to launch an updated version of its platform in the U.S. and India in 2024.
Calogero, who also noted U.S. investor reluctance to look into new markets, said he aligned with TrueLeap due to a common goal of bridging the digital divide in education around the world. According to the World Bank, 70% of 10-year-olds in low- and middle-income economies cannot read and understand a basic text, which the World Bank defines as “learning poverty.”
Meanwhile, the Brookings Institute has observed the advance of a “second digital divide” as artificial intelligence tools have entered the education sector.
“1.6 [billion], 1.7 billion kids attend schools where there isn’t any kind of connectivity,” Calogero said. “It’s a difficult problem to solve because the scale of investments need to be in the billions of dollars. It doesn’t make sense for a telecommunications company to lay out a fiber in the middle of nowhere, but now there are technologies like satellites that can bridge this gap.”
TrueLeap’s office is listed at 1801 Main St. in Houston, which is also home to the Impact Hub Houston coworking space and the Downtown Launch Pad.
