When Lumos Capital Group was conducting its due diligence on Ellevation Education in 2020, the firm liked what it saw. After all, the Boston-based software company developed a platform to make administrators and educators more productive, collaborative, and effective. Built around the idea of equal opportunity for English language learners (ELL) – the fastest-growing portion of America’s K-12 student demographics – the Lumos team felt Ellevation would make a strong initial investment for the young firm.

Lumos was in good company. The firm led a round in which it was joined by early-stage investors that included the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the family foundation of pediatrician and philanthropist Priscilla Chan and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, as well as Emerson Collective, a social change organization and impact investor founded by Laurene Powell Jobs, an American businesswoman and widow of Steve Jobs. The transaction was completed in early 2020 and Ellevation, which offers products to help teachers serve multilingual learners and provide students with the academic language necessary for success in school, became Lumos’s first investment.

What the team could not have anticipated was COVID-19 resulting in EdTech becoming all the more critical in today’s society. This made Ellevation’s longer-term growth prospects even more attractive. “The company actually launched a direct-to-student product during COVID,” recalls James Tieng, Lumos Managing Partner & Co-Founder. “They were planning to do it anyway, but the tailwinds accelerated around academic language, which is content and curricula with a specific pedagogical approach for a non-native speaker. We believe we can do better by all the ELLs in this country by helping grow this platform over time.”