Literably Wins Learning Engineering Tools Competition

New Funding Enables Literacy Startup to Bring Better EdTech to Students Nationwide

SAN FRANCISCO, June 29, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Literably, the reading assessment platform that empowers educators to "know every reader," today announced it has been named as a winner of The Learning Engineering Tools Competition. The new funding will enable Literably to advance the reach of its education technology solution and continue to deliver on its mission to remedy the critical issue of low literacy rates. The competition provides Literably with important resources to accelerate scalability and adoption of its literacy assessment platform across the United States.

The Learning Engineering Tools Competition aims to spur the growth of new and improved technologies that will help remedy critical issues in education for learners of all ages and across the globe while also advancing the field of learning engineering. The competition sparked tremendous interest from teams around the world, with more than 800 proposals competing for $4 million in prizes – making it one of the largest edtech competitions ever convened.

"All students deserve to be reading at grade level as soon as possible," said Tyler Borek, Literably's chief executive officer. "We plan to capitalize on our momentum and expand Literably to more districts across the US for the 2022-2023 school year."

The latest funding marks Literably's second grant announcement within one month. In May, the company announced it was awarded a prestigious $1 million dollar grant from the United States Department of Education's Institute for Education Sciences' (ED/IES) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program.

Literably is a diagnostic digital reading assessment platform that replicates teacher-administered assessments online and enables educators to know every reader. Literably provides literacy educators with an immediate, accurate and actionable picture of each student's reading capabilities and challenges. Schools use Literably to solve four primary challenges with conventional teacher-administered reading assessments: efficiency, consistency, data access and instructional next steps. Currently, Literably uses a blend of normed human grading and speech recognition to score two reading assessments online for schools and districts: Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) and Foundational Skills (FS). Research led by a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education has shown that Literably ORF can predict student performance on the Smarter Balanced assessment. Literably currently serves over 200,000 students at over 500 schools in 34 states. Literably was founded in 2013 and is headquartered in San Francisco, CA.

SOURCE Literably