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Joseph Connor
Associate at Faegre Drinker
Founder and CEO at Agora
Highlights
I am excited to share the news that Odyssey has secured $10M in Series A funding led by Bradley Tusk of Tusk Venture Partners, with support from Katherine Boyle of Andreessen Horowitz, Benjamin Ling of Bling Capital, and Benjamin Kohlmann of Cubit Capital.
In the past three years, the Odyssey team has accomplished a lot.
-We’ve scaled our school choice software into three states -Hired an incredible team passionate about helping families -Onboarded 140,000 primarily low income students -Awarded and disbursed $400M+ in state funding -Launched the industry’s first real-time identification solution -Onboarded more than 1k vendors onto our marketplace with 12,000+ offerings
I want to also give a special thank you to Packy McCormick, Steve Kupfer, Katelyn Donnelly, Eric Theis, Oliver Hsu, Leila Hay, Michelle V., Addie Lerner, Anne Dwane, John Danner, Charlie Pinto, Avid Ventures, and Village Global for their belief in the mission and support. We are excited to put this investment to good use by rolling out additional features for parents to make accessing programs easier.
A huge thanks to everyone in the Odyssey community for supporting our mission to date, especially the entire Odyssey team and the families we serve. Together, we are changing the landscape of education - and we are just getting started!
https://lnkd.in/eSDvkpSH
Odyssey is proud to help manage the Iowa Students First Education Savings Account (ESA) program. The program provides Iowa families with public funding to attend the K-12 school of their choice.
Since launching only 2.5 days ago, we've had over 9,900 Iowa students apply for the program! Other cool launch facts:
🕛 On average, one application was submitted every 12 seconds in the first 24 hours.
🏃♂️ Wednesday's launch also marked the first time any ESA program across the country used an automated approval process for applicants, enabling the successful verification of applicants' residency, income, and identification within seconds rather than weeks.
👩💼 The average wait time on Odyssey's help line was only 90 seconds.
Thank you to our Iowa state partners for helping to build an incredible user experience, and we look forward to continue to work hard to deliver for Iowa families.
