UNBOUND TALENT: Baltimore-based Unbound Concepts scored a win in November by signing up two experienced edtech leaders to its core team. Martin Brutosky, who spent five years CEO of eChalk, is joining as chief operating officer. Tom Murdock, who launched and helped grow Moodlerooms before it was acquired Blackboard, will be chief branding officer. Founded in 2011 by Katie Palenscar, a former teacher, Unbound offers an adaptive book recommendation engine. The company was part of the first cohort of New York ed tech accelerator Socratic Labs.
In 2012, the company launched its first product, Book Leveler, an iPhone app that lets teachers scan books to learn about reading levels or offer their own recommendations on levels. Currently there are 40,000 users on this app, which feeds data to Unbound's publisher platform. Unbound says it is on pace to have 500,000 titles on the publisher platform by the first quarter of 2015.
"Martin and Tom really understood the heart of this company from the start," Palenscar says. "The three of us get excited about unlocking the different ways that books recommend themselves to us."
