USA – Ello, a San Francisco, CA-based developer of an AI reading coach, raised USD15M in Series A funding.
The round was led by Goodwater Capital, with participation from Homebrew, Reed Hastings, Common Sense Growth, and Ravensburger. This added to existing funding led by Project A with additional investors Y Combinator, WndrCo, Reach Capital, Visible Ventures, and Khosla Ventures. Coddy Johnson from Goodwater and Anton Waitz from Project A Ventures have joined the board alongside the three co-founders.The company intends to use the funds to expand operations and its business reach.Led by Tom Sayer, CEO, Dr. Elizabeth Adams, CXO, and Catalin Voss, CTO, Ello is solving childhood illiteracy, by scaling 1:1 instruction to maximize the learning potential of all children, regardless of resources. Its first product is a reading coach, empowered by proprietary speech recognition and generative AI. It listens, understands, and engages with children to teach them critical reading skills. With patent-pending speech recognition that is accurate at a phoneme level, Ello can understand a child in a way technology has been unable to before. 08/09/2023
