Empowering Children in the Journey to Read — Our Investment in Litlab
We’re excited to announce our investment in Litlab, a personalized reading & writing platform that enables children to generate digital stories based on their unique interests and preferences. Using generative AI, the software writes prose appropriate for the child’s reading level and creates images and graphics to make it engaging and fun.
The Litlab team believes that harnessing AI can help students craft content that they want to engage with, since Litlab allows children to customize stories to their liking. Sharing and virality are at the core of the product, enabling kids to publish their stories and share with their friends and peer groups to highlight their work and captivate both the creator and their community alike. In addition, Litlab creates a more personalized approach to learning, in which students are the creators of their own reading materials. Research shows that student engagement, a core emphasis of Litlab, is key to reading proficiency and demonstrably improves reading outcomes.
The market for Litlab is vast. The company initially plans to focus on the supplemental English language arts market, addressing the 19M kids in the US who are not reading at grade level in K-12 schools. That alone is estimated to be a $1.6B opportunity. With such a vast market, Litlab has the potential to become a significant player in the education technology space.
We first met co-founder Varun Gulati when we were deploying Fund I at Better Ventures. At the time, Varun was the co-founder and CTO of UClass, which was later acquired by Renaissance Learning in 2015. From this first encounter, we know Varun brings a keen eye for product strategy. The products he built have reached tens of millions of people, plus produced tens of millions in ARR. Importantly, Varun also had a strong personal connection to the problems he has sought to solve as a founder in edtech; he taught math at a public high school as a part of Teach for America.
Christie Chu and Sebastian Belmar round out the impressive team at Litlab. Christie, Head of Learning, brings a teacher’s perspective as a veteran educator in the Oakland Unified School District. She is an expert in curriculum development and community building, having built programs for girls to explore STEM careers and authored distance-learning and SEL curricula, and is strong in organization and operations. Sebastian, Head of Engineering, is an early-stage startup veteran, having held software engineering roles at UClass, Renaissance Learning, HipCamp and Zigazoo, and focused on mission-driven tech. He’s a financial analyst turned software engineer who’s built several successful startups.
We are excited about Litlab because we know how important childhood education and literacy are when looking at socioeconomic impact and success. Reading and writing are crucial components of a child’s education. Reading is an important predictor of future success; a key indicator of a child’s likelihood to attend college and achieve a prosperous life is whether they are reading at grade level. However, our public education system is in a state of crisis, with only 32% of fourth graders reading at grade level proficiency. To add another wrinkle to this issue, studies show that independent reading among K-12 students dropped dramatically during COVID lockdowns and has remained low. We as a society cannot afford to let this trend continue.
We’re hopeful that by harnessing tools like generative AI we can reverse these trends. Litlab is well poised to make a big dent in this market and its team has the experience and passion for solving childhood literacy. We’ve all seen the discussion in school systems of banning tools like ChatGPT that some educators fear will encourage academic dishonesty. Instead, let’s move toward using it for good — to create highly engaging stories where children see themselves represented and can’t wait to pick up their next book.
Want to try it yourself? Visit Litlab to write your own story!
