BookNook: Portfolio Company Case Study
We are in the midst of a literacy crisis. Last year, the first national assessment of fourth graders’ reading since the pandemic illuminated the devastating impact COVID had on reading skill development, as students faced the largest decline in scores in 30 years. Furthermore, this negative trend was most significant in students in the lowest quartile of reading comprehension, setting them back even further relative to their classmates. Literacy has critical implications on long-term health, income, and dependence on public assistance, making this not only a moral issue, but a financial one. For these reasons, investing in literacy is particularly fruitful; studies have shown that $1 invested in early education provides a return of about $9.
Enter BookNook. After not seeing the results he had hoped for from his education nonprofit, BookNook’s founder and CEO Michael Lombardo decided that the private sector was better equipped to reach scale in addressing the literacy gap. He launched BookNook, a edtech platform that gives students access to tutors and engaging curriculums to increase their academic achievement; and raised money from some of the top edtech venture investors, including Reach Capital and Kapor Capital. Quality tutoring has an outsized effect on student outcomes, increasing grade point averages and likelihoods to stay in school, and BookNook’s reach has been vast thus far. Since its founding in 2016, BookNook has served over 2500 schools and provided nearly 1.5M sessions to students. The academic impacts have also been noteworthy, with active students demonstrating an accelerated growth trajectory. 
Source: BookNook End-of-Year Impact Report
There are several theories on the best way to teach kids how to read - listen to the podcast “Sold a Story” about how a faulty method of literacy instruction proliferated in classrooms despite its inefficacy. That’s why efficacy studies, done right, and on a continuous basis, are compulsory.Rise Together Ventures participated in BookNook’s Series B, because we are excited about the potential of this company and the scalability of their solution with respect to both reading and math, both in-person and virtual. BookNook is also the perfect platform to launch third-party led efficacy studies, and to share that data openly. Plus, in order for BookNook to have the scale it would like in the future, it’s important to be able to understand and communicate its impactful results. RTV’s unique philanthropic mirroring structure provided a unique opportunity to kickstart a critical impact project for them and the education industry at large. This year, BookNook launched a randomized control trial to estimate the causal effect of BookNook on student literacy. Focused on 1st-4th graders and in partnership with a CA-based charter school system, the study will measure the link between BookNook usage and student literacy growth. RTV’s philanthropic capital will cover a portion of the study’s costs. Overall, the study will be leveraged to inform best practices for intervention and high impact tutoring to help districts nationwide support students’ instructional needs in a post-pandemic educational context.Put simply, by investing as both an equity partner and a philanthropic donor, RTV can amplify the social impact capabilities of BookNook and glean unbiased, data-driven results to inform the future of how our children learn.Georgia Hoagland