A Cincinnati startup founded by two former teachers has raised millions in new funding from a coastal investor with some help from a Wisconsin investor.
Abre, an edtech platform for K-12 schools, closed a $24 million Series A led by PeakSpan Capital, a growth equity firm based in New York City and Silicon Valley that's making its first foray into the local ecosystem. The round also included follow-on participation from Cleveland’s JumpStart Ventures, JobsOhio Growth Capital Fund and Golden Angels Investors, a Brookfield-based angel group.
According to its website, Golden Angels Investors began in 2002 with the goal of backing entrepreneurs in the Midwest. It has members who are founders, CEOs, venture capitalists and business leaders that make individual investment decisions under terms negotiated with entrepreneurs. The group then invests as a single entity.
The Abre raise is the Cincinnati region’s second-largest of the year and the second with ties to Wisconsin. Coterie, which has its largest office in Appleton, announced a $27 million round in March.
The company will use the cash to invest in research and development and innovation – focusing on tools like predictive analytics and artificial intelligence.
It also now plans to scale outside the Midwest, James Stoffer, Abre’s CEO, told me. The team is even eyeing international expansion a few years down the road, he said.
“Frankly, we have a pretty mature product that’s ready, and there’s all this pent-up demand,” Stoffer said. “This investment not only validates our vision and strategy but also provides us with the resources needed to accelerate our growth and continue to deliver impactful solutions to our school and district clients as well as their administrators and staff, community partners, families and students."
Abre, which formally launched in 2017 following a seed investment from CincyTech, was founded by two Hamilton City Schools teachers, Chris Rose and Zach Vander Veen. Stoffer, named its CEO in January 2021, said the company is unique in the K-12 edtech space. Rose and Vander Veen built the product for themselves; they had no plans on starting a company, until neighboring districts saw what they had developed.
“They were educators. There’s not a lot of developers or software engineers hanging around school districts solving for these types of problems,” he said.
Abre helps schools centralize previously siloed data – taken from hundreds of other edtech platforms used across a school district – and helps make it transparent and accessible to all stakeholders in a learning community. The data points are integrated to paint a 360-degree view of a student across social-emotional well-being, enrollment, attendance, intervention, academic performance and more.
Stoffer said there’s been an influx of investments in classroom technology since the pandemic. But K-12 schools and districts are still struggling with achievement gaps, student well-being concerns, chronic absenteeism, teacher shortages and more.
Through the Abre platform, stakeholders are able to identify patterns and trends with data – and support students who are struggling through targeted interventions and strategies.
“We help create confidence for districts in making decisions behind where they put their time, their treasure or their talent,” Stoffer said. “Right now, admittedly, they're relying on anecdotes, stories, feelings, and more often than not, they're probably funding things that aren't working, while defunding things that probably are.”
Currently, the company operates in 13 states. In Ohio alone, it works with nearly 100 school districts including Wyoming City Schools, Mason City Schools and Cincinnati Public Schools locally.
Stoffer said the company is likely to triple that count in the next two years – in addition to its expansion outside the Midwest. Abre will specifically target Texas, California and some parts of the East Coast.
Within a year, he expects to have a presence in roughly half the country. The plan is to set up a beachhead account, or anchor district, then use that success to “slowly, methodically and intentionally grow in and around that geographic area,” he said.
It’s an approach that works particularly well in the K-12 space.
“Momentum tends to build and build when you deliver for your clients, because they're happy to share with other educators what's working for them, because they're not really competitive with one another,” Stoffer said. “It's not like a traditional B2B (business-to-business) SaaS (software-as-a-service) space where everything's kept tight to the vest.”
In four years or so, Abre will start to explore international opportunities, he said, starting first with English-speaking countries. Abre’s product is Google-based, meaning it can also be translated when targeting non-English speaking countries as well.
“The same issue that we see in the United States exists overseas,” he said. “There's too much technology. There are too many silos.”
Abre adds PeakSpan executive to board with plans to hire
For now, the Abre team is 36 people, with six locally based. In the next six months, Stoffer expects headcount to reach 60, with 12 to 15 people based in Greater Cincinnati. The company operates remote-first but is committed to maintaining its headquarters here, he said.
New roles will include product development, marketing, customer support and more.
The raise brings Abre's total funding to date to $30.5 million. Stoffer declined to disclose Abre’s valuation. The round does add a new investor to the Cincinnati ecosystem in PeakSpan, and for Abre, it expands the company’s board of directors to five. Joining is Sanket Merchant, a partner at the firm and head of PeakSpan’s edtech practice.
Stoffer said Abre is Peakspan’s first K-12 edtech investment. Abre, he added, checked all the boxes, particularly with its ability to centralize and synthesize data and its potential to scale globally.
Stoffer credited Abre’s previous investor pool, including CincyTech, Connetic Ventures and Allos Ventures, for laying the foundation.
“This truly is a Cincinnati story,” he said.
PeakSpan, founded in 2015, raised its third fund – totaling $567 million – in 2022 and currently has $1.5 billion in assets under management.
"Abre sits squarely in a thesis we've been developing for years,” Merchant said in a news release. “Districts across the nation are struggling. The data is alarming, and we must do much more to transform student outcomes fundamentally. We could not be more thrilled to partner with the Abre team to capitalize on the forward opportunity.”
David Schuyler of the Milwaukee Business Journal contributed to this article.
