LightSail, the adaptive K-12 literacy solution, today announced advances in its personalized learning technology as well as $3.5 million in a new tranche of funding led by Scott Cook, the co-founder and Chairman of the Executive Committee of Intuit.
LightSail has added numerous motivation and reward features to incentivize students to appropriately challenge themselves and increase reading volumes. In addition, LightSail has added new scaffolds for below-benchmark readers, in order to actively optimize materials for students reading below grade level.
LightSail’s new features also include personalized word walls to support each student’s vocabulary acquisition and an in-text chat option for reading groups, allowing students to have social media-style dialogues directly in texts.
An overview of LightSail’s features can be viewed at www.lightsailed.com/tour.
Scott Cook and his wife, Signe Ostby, selected LightSail for investment based on their extensive education market research conducted together with the Bridgespan Group. Mr. Cook is a co-founder of Intuit, and his dedication to entrepreneurism at Intuit was featured in Eric Ries’ book The Lean Startup. Ms. Ostby has been involved in education for over two decades, having had leadership roles in several schools from Pre-K to graduate schools.
