In our May/June cover story, Kevin Carey wrote about AltSchool, a for-profit start-up launched by the former Google executive Max Ventilla. AltSchool is trying to re-invent elementary and middle school education through the integration of personalized technology. In early May, AltSchool announced that it had taken in $100 million of new venture capital, thanks in part to investments of undisclosed amounts by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, venture capital firms Learn Capital and Founders Fund, and the Emerson Collective, a philanthropic organization founded by Laurene Powell Jobs. Last year, AltSchool raised $33 million. “This is the melding of the physical and the virtual in a very technologically informed way,” Robert J. Hutter, managing partner at Learn Capital, told the New York Times. “The entire experimentation meme itself, that is part of the essence of the company, is a compelling one to parents.”
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