Richmond edtech startup Trilogy Mentors has a new name — Pearl.
Founder John Failia said the rebranding is a reflection of the startup's evolution over the last five years.
"Within this last year we figured out where we belonged," he said. "We wanted a new brand to pay homage to where we came from but that lays the groundwork to where we’re going."
Trilogy Mentors originally launched 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.
Failla said he initially decided to move to an online platform to serve a larger number of students. In its first year online, the company saw the completion of more than 1,000 hours of tutoring. Last year, Trilogy Mentors pivoted again and built its own platform.
"We realized the problem in the space was in the infrastructure to help existing tutoring companies move online in a meaningful way," he said. "We licensed out our all-in-one hybrid tutoring platform to companies, institutions and freelancers so they can launch programs overnight."
This helped the startup scale to more than 6,000 instructional hours by the end of 2020, and by then, Failia knew a rebrand was in order. He said the team worked with professionals to ensure the change made sense for the long-term. He said they heard several good ideas, but Pearl stood out the most.
"A pearl is started by a grain of sand finding itself into a shell and over time, as more things are added, it starts to grow into something beautiful," he said. "They all hold value but form in a slightly different way, and that was applicable across our entire journey."
Failia added, "You can also take it and apply it to the programs we are working to stand up. At the end of the day, we exist to improve student outcomes, the relationship every student builds with their instructor, as well as how they grow and learn on their own."