Voqal is proud to announce its latest round of Education Opportunity Project investments directed at supporting companies that are using innovative approaches to address opportunity gaps in education. The investments in Pairin, Sown to Grow, LiftEd, inquirED, BeforeWeBegin, and Words Liive reflect Voqal’s commitment to creating a more equitable educational landscape.
Pairin – $100,000 investment
Pairin is a social enterprise whose mission is to make education relevant and hiring equitable. The Pairin team believes that by providing the right data, tools, and resources they can remove the barriers that prevent people and organizations from reaching maximum effectiveness.
Sown to Grow – $65,000 investment
Sown to Grow is a comprehensive goal setting, reflection, and metacognition platform for K-12 schools. The platform builds student agency, learning strategies, and Social Emotional Learning (SEL) skills.
LiftEd – $45,000 investment
LiftEd helps improve outcomes for the 1 in 5 students who learn differently. LiftEd bridges the digital divide between special education compliance and the classroom. It integrates special learning plans from any system and automatically keeps them in sync with daily instruction, intervention, and support practices. LiftEd provides the tools needed to simplify and choreograph the workflow of educators, specialists, and therapists, in one secure cloud-based platform.
inquirED – $60,000 investment
InquirED is a woman-led Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company that integrates curriculum and professional learning to transform classrooms through inquiry-based learning, starting with social studies with plans to expand to other subjects as the platform is built out. It uses a three-prong approach to form an inquiry-based classroom, which consists of curriculum and assessment; instructional leadership; and professional learning communities.
BeforeWeBegin – $40,000 investment
BeforeWeBegin is a woman-led company that offers a suite of parent and teacher tools to distribute high-quality, digital content covering mental and reproductive health topics. Spurred on by the huge market hole in providing relevant, factual, complete, and engaging content in the areas of mental, physical, and sexual health in middle school, the founders of BeforeWeBegin have developed both parent-facing and teacher-facing tools to quickly and easily find and deliver this content.
Words Liive – $40,000 investment
Words Liive is a BiPOC-led company that uses popular music and a culturally responsive pedagogy to increase student engagement in literacy. Operating under the theory that using music to teach literacy results in increased student engagement and better educational outcomes, the company’s software uses a patented algorithm to match a literacy concept (for example, alliteration) to a lyric or song from a modern artist in order to reinforce the literary theme. Words Liive is working to bring two-thirds of American students’ grade-level reading proficiency by the year 2040.
Voqal’s Education Opportunity Project seeks to measurably reduce educational opportunity gaps by providing capital and strategic advice to entrepreneurs and organizations working to improve educational outcomes for disadvantaged populations. We believe these companies exemplify this vision and are excited for their continued efforts at addressing the disparities in the United States education system.
Learn more about the Education Opportunity Project and the organizations it supports here.