GROWING READING TIME: LightSail, the developer of adaptive literacy software, has raised $11 million in a Series B round led by Scott Cook, the co-founder and Chairman of the Executive Committee of Intuit. The Bezos Family Foundation (run by the parents of Amazon CEO and founder, Jeff Bezos), also joined existing investors in the round.
LightSail helps students to build literacy skills as they read from a library of 80,000 fiction and non-fiction titles, each embedded with questions that match the student’s reading level. Teachers can track how students are performing on these assessments. The company claims that with 25 minutes per day, kids have been experiencing at least two years of lexile growth in a single year.
The NYC-based startup has raised over $23 million since its founding in 2012. According to LightSail CEO Gideon Stein, the investment will help the company to reach more schools and speed up sales and marketing efforts. The tool is currently used by more than 200,000 students across more than 700 schools and districts including NYC Department of Education and Los Angeles Unified School District.
