Founded by Harvard Business School alum Rafael Corrales and a team that includes Thianh Lu and Guillermo Rauch, LearnBoost is a San Francisco based educational startup that offer free software for teachers and educators.
LearnBoost provides a simple, clean digital grade book with easy grade input and integrated statistics. Teachers can customize their grade scale and give different weight to each of their assignments that make up a course.
With a few clicks, LearnBoost allows teachers to track daily student attendance – cutting down time spent on traditional paper roll-calls, leaving more time for teaching.
Teachers can use LearnBoost to pull up information on a single student as well as the whole class. LearnBoost comes with a tool to build lesson plans, which allow for the inclusion of text, other media files, and the ability to integrate Common Core State Standards. All the data from the service will be stored and archived and can be printed if required.
LearnBoost is currently distributing their software for free, with plans to run a freemium business model. Some features will cost educators, although the breakdown of premium features and customization options have yet to be announced. School budgets are notoriously tight, and offering the service for free allows more teachers to get LearnBoost in their hands and in their classrooms.
LearnBoost raised its initial funding from some very notable venture capital firms such as Bessemer Venture Partners, Charles River Ventures, RRE Ventures, and Atlas Ventures. The young startup have also had help from angel investors such as Naval Ravikant, Bill Lee, James Hong, Karl Jacob, Othman Laraki, and several others.