Like Mark Zuckerberg, Yalies Aaron Feuer, Alexander "Xan" Tanner, and David Carel launched a tech startup while they were still undergraduates. Unlike Harvard's most famous dropout, the Yale trio finished their schooling this year.
Also unlike the Facebook founder, Feuer-Tanner-Carel have not (yet) made gazillions of dollars on their venture. But they've picked up a little bit of Zuckerberg's cash: their company, Panorama Education, announced today that it has raised $4 million in seed funding, "co-led by Mark Zuckerberg's Startup:Education."
Panorama creates surveys for K-12 schools and then analyzes the data, giving teachers and administrators "clear and constructive feedback that they can use to improve their teaching and their schools," the company's website says.
Founded last year with training and funding from the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute, Panorama Ed is currently running "large-scale survey and analysis programs in 4,000 schools across 26 states," serving more than 1 million students, the company says. Panorama will use the $4 million to "launch a new free tool for individual teachers and to add new data analytics features to its platform."
"We are using technology to address some of the most difficult problems in education," Feuer says in the press release. "We aim to help every school use data to tackles the issues that are most pressing in their communities."
In an e-mail, Feuer notes that "our entire team is Yalies." In addition to the founders, they include Michael DiScala '14, Geoffrey Litt '14, John Gerlach '14, and Jacob Evelyn '13. Several Yale alums invested in the company too, he says: Eric Ries ’00, Ka Mo Lau ’09, and Jeff Epstein ’77.
The customer base also includes some Yalie-run systems: for example, the Connecticut Department of Education, headed by commissioner Stefan Pryor ’93, ’06JD; and the New Haven public schools, where Garth Harries ’95 became superintendent this year.
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