Ed Tech startups Ellevation Education, iCreate to Educate and Zulama separately announced a combined total of $1.7 Mil in funding rounds, strategic investments and grants at today's "Across Boundaries: Innovation & The Future of Education" conference co-sponsored by MIT Sloan.Ed and LearnLaunch, a non-profit organization driving the growth of learning and education technology companies and the New England ed tech business cluster. The founding of LearnLaunchX, New England's first major Ed Tech and digital learning-focused accelerator, was also announced.

"Today Ellevation is announcing that it has secured over $1.5M in capital from a terrific group of aligned investors that are passionate about driving change in public education," said Jordan Meranus, Ellevation, LLC CEO & Co-Founder. Ellevation, a Boston-based software company focused exclusively on English Language Learners and the educators that serve them, was founded by Meranus and Teddy Rice approximately 15 months ago. Over the past year the company has enjoyed considerable success, building a great team, launching its first product, and increasing the total number of district customers to 120 across 14 states.

Among Ellevation's investors are LearnLaunch founder Eileen Rudden, long-time Boston venture capitalist Rick Burnes, entrepreneur and investor Josh Tolkoff, Adam Miller, the founder and CEO of Cornerstone on Demand, and NewSchools Venture Fund's Seed Fund.

Ellevation-- previously called ESL Innovation--was started in 2006 by Carrie Hill, an ELL Coordinator in North Carolina. Carrie's inspiration for creating the company grew out of the frustration that so many ELL professionals experience: the overwhelming administrative burden which diverted significant attention away from the instruction of her students. As with so many entrepreneurs, Carrie had a belief that there must be a better way to meet her duties as a coordinator and serve her students.

In 2011, Ellevation was formed and merged with ESL Innovations. Ellevation's co-founders, Teddy Rice and Jordan Meranus, are now working closely with Carrie and her team to build a suite of software tools to help manage ELL programs and improve student achievement. Our current product, ESLReps, is an administrative and data management software tool that helps ELL coordinators and teachers capture an array of data specifically related to English Language Learners. Unlike other data tools, ESLReps enables the convenient generation of reports that enhance communication among ELL and classroom teachers, auto-populates required correspondence to parents in over 20 languages, automatically captures information in the format that satisfies state and federal officials, and much more. We currently serve over 100 district accounts in 12 states with over 100,000 students collectively in all the accounts.