Richmond entrepreneurs Michael Bor and Chris Bossola have closed a $4.5 million funding round for a new education-focused venture.
Bor founded used-car retailer CarLotz, and Bossola founded clothing retailer Need Supply Co. Both had left their companies in recent years and were looking for new opportunities. They have known each other for a decade, having met through a business roundtable group. Bor approached Bossala about his idea of building a company around endowments for public high schools, and The Endowment Project was born.
The genesis of the idea came in 2020 when CarLotz went public. At the time, Bor’s high school, a private high school with a $1.5 billion endowment, contacted him seeking a donation after his personal wealth grew through the IPO. Bor talked to fellow CarLotz founder Will Boland, who attended a public high school, Douglas S. Freeman, and asked if his high school had contacted him. Boland said it had not.
“I tucked that away and thought it was unfortunate that a school that arguably doesn’t need the money has the infrastructure to make the ask, and someone like Freeman does not,” Bor said. “When I left CarLotz, I started thinking about that more.”
The new funding will be used to create an online portal where public high schools can start an endowment. Each high school will have a foundation that is separate from the school. The Endowment Project will create a donor base and build and manage the endowment. The portal will be a place where students and teachers can make requests for money, and the donor base and endowment can be utilized to fulfill the requests.
“There will be a lot of testing,” Bor said. “We have to build out the technology. We have to build out a development team.”
Bor declined to name the individual investors in the funding round.
The goal is to create a platform and start pilot projects with one or two schools in Virginia by the end of the year. Eventually, The Endowment Project wants to run 10 pilot projects across the state. Bor said the company wants the pilot schools to be from a variety of geographic and socioeconomic areas. He knows that it will be a bigger challenge for less wealthy districts to raise money.
“We have spoken to schools,” Bor said. “We have spoken to administrators. We have spoken to people in the education world. Everybody thinks this is incredible.”
The model is a public high school in Boston that operates a separate foundation, Bor said. Boston Latin draws on its foundation’s $60 million endowment each year to better fund the school. It adds $3 million to $5 million to the school’s budget annually.
The Endowment Project plans to charge a percentage on the funds raised and an annual management fee. The goal is to have 1,000 high schools within 10 years. Bor envisions approaching large foundations and asking the organizations to provide private funding to the network of high schools, especially ones in disadvantages areas.
Bor said was surprised to find most public high schools do not have endowments. Public universities have a long tradition of raising private money through endowments, and they’ve long been lucrative vehicles for Ivy League schools. A there’s a huge opportunity within public high schools: In the United States, 200 million people attended a public high school, and the country currently has roughly 25,000 such institutions. With the project, the goal is to provide better educational opportunities for students in public education.
“My partner and I have a big dream with it, and what we are dreaming about is the massive impact we can have on public education,” Bor said.
