Startup profile: KickUp<\/p>\n
Founded by: Jeremy Rogoff and Victoria Kinzig<\/p>\n
Year founded: 2014<\/p>\n
Headquarters: Philadelphia, PA<\/p>\n
Sector: Education<\/p>\n
Funding and valuation: ~$6 million raised<\/p>\n
Key ecosystem partners: Lighthouse Labs, Imagine K12<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
There was one problem: \u201cMy classroom didn\u2019t even have a SMART Board,\u201d Rogoff told Technical.ly.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cSchool districts spend billions of dollars a year on professional development, but most of it is disconnected from what\u2019s actually happening in classrooms.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jeremy Rogoff, KickUp<\/p>\n
\u201cSchool districts spend billions of dollars a year on professional development,\u201d Rogoff said, \u201cbut most of it is disconnected from what\u2019s actually happening in classrooms.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 also a former classroom teacher \u2014 to try something new. In 2014, they founded a startup.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe started KickUp to give the people who run schools the data to address that problem,\u201d Rogoff said.<\/p>\n
Today, KickUp<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n A pivot, a pair of incubators, and a return to Philadelphia<\/p>\n Rogoff and Kinzig, who both grew up in Lower Merion, had never started a company before.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t work out, but it was enough to raise an initial seed round of about $600,000 and hire the first few employees.<\/p>\n A second stop at Imagine K12<\/a>, the edtech accelerator that later became part of Y Combinator, helped KickUp develop the first version of the product it still offers today.\u00a0<\/p>\n