The edtech industry is ripe for disruption, and John Failla is stocking up on funds and expertise to disrupt it.
Failla’s Richmond-based startup Trilogy Mentors has closed a pre-seed funding round of $835,000, led by Rosetta Stone co-founder Michael Silverman and the Maclaurin Group.
The MacLaurin Group’s strategic investment will also add talent to the startup, as founding partner Alan Williamson – former CTO of Royall & Co. – will serve as interim CTO. He adds to the recent onboarding of Nathaniel Casey as chief revenue officer.
The funds will be used for additional key hires, marketing and further platform development.
“[Silverman] is a local founder, who is bringing value to the company in more ways than simply a check,” Failla said. “He has been especially helpful in leveraging his experience to help us communicate with the traditional mom-and-pop, brick-and-mortar tutoring companies.”
Trilogy launched in 2015 as an in-person tutoring program and went through the Lighthouse Labs accelerator in 2016 before transitioning to a technology company. The SaaS startup now provides a cloud-based service allowing educators to launch and scale a branded, relationship-based online learning platform.
Trilogy’s software matches students with mentors who best meet their academic needs. On the platform, students can set up video chats, exchange documents and messages, and work on problems using an electronic whiteboard.
“The main factor behind our raise was the opportunity we saw to license our platform to like-minded learning organizations,” Failla said. “We realized that we built an incredibly powerful system to facilitate our holistic form of education and that a number of other organizations saw significant value in the ability to white-label our platform.”
Since early 2018, it has facilitated more than 10,000 tutoring sessions with students from dozens of schools and educational organizations. For example, Failla said, Trilogy is working with a dyslexia-specific tutoring provider to launch an online program and helping a mentoring organization in Chicago increase online program accessibility.
For the current academic year, Trilogy expects to facilitate more than 100,000 learning sessions through the platform.
Failla, who studied business at the University of Richmond, sees the service as part of a natural shift toward digital education and online learning. The startup primarily works with educational institutions, offering contracts for schools to use the mentoring sessions and track how students are progressing.
To accommodate its expansion, Trilogy has grown to six full-time and four part-time employees, with plans to add more staff in technology and sales. Moving forward, it’s working to build data visualization tools to help licensees define the health of their business, the academic and emotional growth of students, the effectiveness of instructors and the overall satisfaction of parents.
