Startup profile: KickUp
Founded by: Jeremy Rogoff and Victoria Kinzig
Year founded: 2014
Headquarters: Philadelphia, PA
Sector: Education
Funding and valuation: ~$6 million raised
Key ecosystem partners: Lighthouse Labs, Imagine K12
When Jeremy Rogoff was an early-career high school teacher, he got sent to a professional development session on an interactive chalkboard replacement called SMART Board.
There was one problem: “My classroom didn’t even have a SMART Board,” Rogoff told Technical.ly.
It was more than a wasted afternoon, he said. The school district had paid a consultant, pulled Rogoff out of his classroom, hired a substitute, and spent money on a session that had nothing to do with what he actually needed.
“School districts spend billions of dollars a year on professional development, but most of it is disconnected from what’s actually happening in classrooms.”
Jeremy Rogoff, KickUp
“School districts spend billions of dollars a year on professional development,” Rogoff said, “but most of it is disconnected from what’s actually happening in classrooms.”
That experience, and the belief that schools should be built around helping teachers improve instead of having compliance boxes to check off, is what drove Rogoff to join with Victoria Kinzig — also a former classroom teacher — to try something new. In 2014, they founded a startup.
“We started KickUp to give the people who run schools the data to address that problem,” Rogoff said.
Today, KickUp works with close to 200 school systems across about 30 states, including the School District of Philadelphia, where the company is headquartered. Overall, he said, they serve roughly 300,000 educators.
A pivot, a pair of incubators, and a return to Philadelphia
Rogoff and Kinzig, who both grew up in Lower Merion, had never started a company before.
Kinzig had taught in Philly public schools as a Teach For America corps member; Rogoff had taught high school math and Spanish in the Arkansas Delta and Washington DC. Together, they gave themselves three months to figure out whether they could build something around the problem they had lived firsthand.
That led them to Lighthouse Labs, a Richmond, Virginia-based pre-accelerator that offered early funding and startup support. The first version of the product didn’t work out, but it was enough to raise an initial seed round of about $600,000 and hire the first few employees.
A second stop at Imagine K12, the edtech accelerator that later became part of Y Combinator, helped KickUp develop the first version of the product it still offers today.
In mid-2016, Rogoff and Kinzig returned to Philadelphia and opened a small office in Center City, where one of their earliest investors, Bob Moore (then founder of RJ Metrics, later of Crossbeam) became their first landlord.
KickUp has since raised about $6 million in total and now has about 35 employees. The company gave up its physical office during the pandemic but retains a concentration of staff in the Philadelphia and New York areas.
Professional development and performance tracking, combined
KickUp combines professional development management software with performance management software. In most school districts, Rogoff said, those two functions are managed across completely separate systems.
It’s built for three types of users:
Teachers use KickUp to find and register for professional learning opportunities, track credentials and set goals.
Principals and coaches use it to document classroom observations and connect what they see to the support teachers have received.
District leaders can then look across schools and teacher groups to understand whether professional learning is actually correlating with changes in classroom practice.
Most of the large competitors in this space, Rogoff said, are legacy software companies that have stitched together smaller acquisitions into something marketed as a comprehensive solution.
What they lack, he argues, is depth of expertise in teacher growth specifically, and a product shaped by people who understand what it feels like to be in a classroom.
Why the principal’s job is ‘almost universally set up for failure’
At the center of KickUp’s model, per Rogoff, is the school principal.
“The principal’s job is almost universally set up for failure,” he said, noting that school leaders are expected to support teachers, set culture and manage performance while also carrying heavy administrative burdens.
Some of KickUp’s newer tools have cut the time some principals spend on post-observation writeups from four to six hours to roughly 45 minutes to an hour, he said — that’s a per-task time savings of 80%. The point: It’s easier to get out of paperwork and into classrooms.
KickUp has accumulated more than 4.5 million professional development records, 300,000 professional development sessions and hundreds of thousands of classroom observations — what Rogoff called the most robust data set on the educator experience in the market.
The company is now using that data to build a suite of AI-supported tools, rolling out this summer, designed to help principals give better, less biased feedback by grounding evaluations in a teacher’s full history rather than a single classroom snapshot.
That work, Rogoff said, is only possible because of who is building it.
“If you talk to our customers, they often say, ‘You understand us,’” Rogoff said, paraphrasing his users: “This looks like software that was built by educators, as opposed to software that was built by technologists trying to serve education.”
This story is made possible thanks to support from Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern Pennsylvania, a nonprofit that leads the Philadelphia region’s equitable economic growth by nurturing and investing in innovative, early-stage companies, and through purposeful involvement in regional and national initiatives. All stories are independently reported, with no partner review.