Edtech startup AllHere announced Wednesday it raised $8 million in a Series A round led by Spero Ventures. The funding will be used to improve the company’s conversational AI chatbot — the first of its kind in the K-12 space that helps schools improve student attendance and grades.
“Imagine having access to a highly qualified attendance advisor for every student in a classroom,” AllHere’s founder and CEO Joanna Smith said in a statement. “This funding allows us to expand the knowledge-base of our conversational AI chatbot to help students and families get information and support exactly when they need it.”
Smith was inspired to create AllHere after spending years as a public school teacher and family engagement leader here in Boston. She found that excessive absenteeism consistently affected student performance, and wanted to find a better way to support the children, their parents, and the teachers trying to educate them.
Chronic absenteeism has become even more of a pressing issue amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Between the back and forth of remote and hybrid models, and the lack of uniformity on how exactly to take attendance, K-12 kids have been missing a lot of school in the past year.
Chronic absence in schools is defined as missing 10 percent or more of the school year, and data recently released by the U.S. Department of Education, as reported by NPR in April, found that some students are missing much more than that.
This problem has been a big boon for services like AllHere, though. When the company released its first chatbot last year, its user base grew by more than 700 percent — expanding from about 1,000 schools when the pandemic started to 8,000 schools across 34 states today.
“AllHere is a perfect example of how the pandemic has accelerated innovation in the education industry,” Andrew Parker, a general partner at Spero Ventures, said in a statement. “Joanna and her team have built a product that increases attendance and has the potential to become a key channel for schools and families to communicate with each other at all hours of the day.”
Now, with this fresh funding in its coffers, AllHere can expand its chatbot’s capabilities to better support students, parents and teachers through the entire K-12 experience, not just concerns like absenteeism. The company says it would also like to address topics like retention, enrollment and helping students with college and other post-secondary paths.
“This is what our district school partners are asking for as they strive to re-engage students after a challenging year of remote and hybrid learning,” Smith added.
