PeakSpan’s Thesis for Abre

Our EdTech team is thrilled to have led a $24M Series A financing in Abre, a purpose-built and configurable K-12 data warehouse and analytics platform serving U.S. school districts nationwide. Press release.

We’re thrilled to partner with a leadership team that brings deep educational experience in the classroom and across EdTech. Abre was founded in 2017 by two educators — Chris Rose (Chief Product Officer) and Zach Vander Veen(Chief Innovation Officer). James Stoffer leads the team as CEO and brings extensive experience scaling EdTech companies such as DreamBox Learning (acq. by Discovery Education), MasteryConnect (acq. by Instructure), and Hobsons (acq. by PowerSchool). Since initially meeting the team, PeakSpan has been excited by Abre’s differentiated and scalable Data-as-a-Service (“DaaS”) approach to delivering configurable, purpose-built data analytics for K-12 districts. The Abre team’s first-hand experience across the education industry has created an elegant combination of EdTech innovation informed by practitioner expertise. This unique approach streamlines scalability and data accessibility for educators, students, and administrators throughout the K-12 ecosystem by seamlessly building on integrations and stitching together data in distinct configurations for all stakeholders.

Over the last seven years, K-12 has undergone a dramatic transition and transformation marked by a nuanced interplay between student outcomes and the rapid infusion of technology. In response to the pandemic, educators and districts quickly scrambled to embrace digitization to serve students, teachers, and districts remotely. From content delivery and curriculum to instruction and intervention — digital tools rapidly became ubiquitous across the K-12 landscape. While the pandemic precipitated the rapid expansion of EdTech, it also created a new shared challenge amongst districts: overwhelming data silos and underutilized telemetry.

Districts nationwide need help to operationalize data and effectively support students with academic, emotional, and community support. Despite the intense efforts and the influx of capital and technology, K-12 districts unanimously suffer from achievement gaps, social-emotional well-being concerns, and chronic absenteeism. Districts desperately need data-driven solutions to address the issues above; otherwise, they not only fail the current generation of students (and their labor market outcomes) but also face loss of funding directly tied to attendance, performance, and enrollment levels. No district, school, teacher, or student is exempt from these challenges, and the problems are unlikely to retreat unless attacked by new, innovative solutions.

While many point solutions are singularly focused on attendance, performance assessment, multi-tiered systems of support (“MTSS”), or social-emotional well-being — they add to the sprawling data mess that districts are unequipped to manage. Districts cannot effectively identify or remedy at-risk students without contextualizing student data and suffer from three shared fundamental challenges:

i) They suffer from data silos that hinder comprehensive student support

ii) They have a deluge of data collected — which they are underutilizing

iii) The proliferation of technology has amplified financial strain

Abre is purpose-built to address these issues. Abre provides 130+ out-of-the-box integrations and centralizes data from the most widely used EdTech applications removing siloes and providing a single pane of glass. The platform aggregates data and delivers real-time data analysis and configurable dashboards (over 500+ off-the-shelf!) based on the disparate data it collects. It can be contextualized to paint a full 360-degree view of the student, democratizing data analytics and enabling early identification. Furthermore, these dashboards and data integrations are designed to be scalable and dynamic for all stakeholders, even as their main concerns change over time. These dashboards power operational decision-making at the student, staff, school, district, and community levels, including assessment of key vectors of student support (improved student outcomes) and effectiveness of EdTech tools (cost savings). The struggle of early identification or measuring holistic student progress (outside of just academic performance) is not new for educators; however, it is one that the market is more capable of answering than ever before (even if we are currently failing to). The explosion of technology (however disjointed) means that telemetry is being captured, and the portrait of a student CAN be painted — it just requires a canvas (Abre) and a painter (configurable platform + DaaS) to put it all together.

Abre’s value proposition extends well beyond data visualization; in fact, Abre serves as a critical platform for community engagement, parent communications, student intervention, surveys, and curriculum repositories. Their positioning as a data warehouse enables them to be the integral system of record (“ISoR”) for the K-12 ecosystem, bolstered by the fact that every segment of the community (students, parents, teachers, and superintendents) is using the platform with their unique use cases. Each stakeholder effectively turns to Abre as THE central operating system for all district engagement across all levels. Abre is unlocking critical insights, empowering educators to optimize student support, and ultimately improving student outcomes across K-12 districts nationwide — all while delivering fully automated and scalable DaaS analytics. Their impact and platform transcend well beyond the classroom and will extend into student career readiness, community engagement, curriculum management, and much more!

PeakSpan is humbled and thrilled to support the Abre team on their scale-up journey as they become the leading K-12 data warehouse and operating system for K-12 districts nationally!