Why We Invested in Cloverly

By Chris Wu

The Role of Carbon Removal and Voluntary Carbon Markets

Carbon removal technologies are likely to play a crucial role in limiting warming to 1.5°C. In its April 2022 report on mitigating climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) highlighted the need to rapidly deploy carbon removal technologies to counterbalance hard-to-abate residual emissions and meet net-zero targets at a global scale. High-quality carbon credits are necessary in order to scale-up the deployment and operation of carbon removal technologies. Carbon credits enable businesses to make earlier and more ambitious climate commitments by allowing them to reduce their current emissions through offsets. Further, an active market for high-quality carbon credits is necessary in order to catalyze the flow of investments for deploying existing carbon removal technologies and developing new technologies. Voluntary carbon markets (VCMs) allow carbon emitters to offset their unavoidable emissions by purchasing carbon credits generated by projects targeted at removing or reducing greenhouse gasses (GHG) from the atmosphere. Each credit – which corresponds to one metric ton of reduced, avoided or removed CO2 or equivalent – can be used by a company or an individual to compensate for the emission of one ton of CO2 or equivalent gasses. A high-quality carbon credit represents real, quantifiable, additional, leakage-proof, and permanent GHG emission reductions or removals. VCMs represent an important mechanism to scale high-quality carbon credits from $2 billion in 2021 up to $40 billion by 2030. 

Solution

Cloverly is an API-first marketplace for high-quality carbon credits, enabling businesses to meet their climate goals by offering seamless access to high-quality carbon removal credits from across the globe. While Cloverly is a marketplace for businesses of all sizes looking to offset their emissions voluntarily, it has seen strong traction in the enterprise segment, with customers across industries from logistics to financial services. Cloverly offers an API that matches any transaction with a carbon offset in real-time. Their API calculates the amount of carbon emissions generated by a particular activity and then purchases an offset instrument that pays for avoiding or sequestering the same amount of carbon elsewhere in the environment. Cloverly’s focus on project quality ensures that every carbon credit meets their criteria for additionality, permanence, leakage and other indicators. All projects listed on the marketplace undergo a rigorous quality evaluation process by climate science experts that look at 60+ quality indicators to pick the best projects in the voluntary carbon market. As a result, only 10% of carbon credits pass through their screening process and are deemed high-quality and eligible to be on their marketplace. Cloverly’s marketplace allows customers to buy both spot and forward credits in one click. That means they can purchase and build an inventory of credits that can be retired when needed to help them manage carbon credit price volatility.

Why We Invested

Our investment and impact thesis are premised on the catalytic role that VCMs are likely to play in the coming years. Active and efficient carbon markets will be necessary in order to create the right set of incentives for the deployment of projects offering high-quality carbon credits and the development of new carbon removal technologies. The rapid development and deployment of carbon removal technologies is imperative to the achievement of global climate goals, it’s estimated that 10 gigatons of CO2 will need to be removed from the atmosphere annually by 2050. As governments and corporations set ambitious climate targets that entail more than just reducing their emissions, the relevance of VCMs will increase. With the use of carbon capture technologies set to increase 13x, driven by the provisions of the IRA, VCM transaction volumes are likely to register exponential growth.

While today’s VCM is growing at a breakneck pace, it lacks some of the fundamental elements required to drive meaningful impact at scale. Cloverly has been addressing these problems surrounding access, ease, trust, and transparency since its inception as the first API in the world for carbon credits. On the demand-side, Cloverly’s approach is characterized by a focus on the enterprise segment, a recent change in strategy for which there is already clear evidence of success. Cloverly has seen strong growth in transaction volumes and customer acquisition, and has signed key partnerships with Visa, American Express, Redwood Logistics, Ecolytiq, and Salesforce. On the supply-side, what sets Cloverly apart is its ability to provide customers access to a vast and diverse, high-quality portfolio of both nature-based and technology-based carbon offset projects from across the globe. Its focus on high-quality offsets and sourcing and verification processes are key, and this was critical to us (and, we believe, to its customers), given the significant challenges associated with tracking and verifying project credentials and performance. Lastly, we believe the team, led by CEO Jason Rubottom, has a strong understanding of the problem and the market, as well as a clear and compelling vision for the company. 

Impact

We believe that Cloverly’s marketplace enables both SMBs and large enterprises to effectively offset their emissions through the purchase of high-quality offsets. Purchasing high-quality carbon credits, in addition to eliminating avoidable emissions, plays a critical role in accelerating the transition to net-zero emissions. Making and achieving credible decarbonisation commitments is challenging for businesses, particularly in emissions-intensive sectors. Credits allow businesses to reduce their emissions now through offsets, while taking cost-effective action to reduce future emissions through asset turnover and evolution of their business models. In the longer term, credits have an essential role in offsetting hard-to-abate emissions from products which lack low or zero emissions options. At scale, the carbon removal purchases that transact on Cloverly’s platform can improve the economic viability of emerging carbon capture technologies, thereby catalyzing the flow of capital to that sector. In the case of high quality nature-based offsets, which promote the preservation of natural ecosystems, they direct private financing to climate-action projects that would not otherwise get off the ground. These projects may also offer additional co-benefits in terms of biodiversity protection, pollution prevention, public-health improvements, and local job creation.

Why We Invested In Pear Suite

By Sophia Friedman

Community Health Workers (CHWs) are frontline public health workers who typically share ethnicity, language, socioeconomic status, and life experiences with the community members they serve. CHWs have been identified as a valuable resource that can deliver services around the healthcare journey in a culturally sensitive way, thus leading to positive health outcomes. While the market for care navigation and care coordination is crowded, there is tremendous potential to leverage CHWs as a resource on a larger scale to drive improved health outcomes for underserved communities. The US Department of Health and Human Services’ recently announced of the availability of $226.5M in American Rescue Plan Funding to launch a Community Health Worker Training Program, and there have been (and are expected to be more) shifts in Medicaid funding for the development of community health centers and reimbursement for services provided by CHWs that were not previously reimbursed, therefore creating new opportunities for innovative CHW models. 

Solution

Pear Suite aims to be a trusted care navigator to guide otherwise underserved populations through their health journey. Pear Suite empowers CHWs to support older adults and individuals in underserved communities by providing culturally sensitive, empathetic care navigation. CHWs are lay members of the community who typically work in association with the local health care system in both urban and rural environments. CHWs typically share ethnicity, language, socioeconomic status and life experiences with the communities they serve (NIH). Pear Suite leverages CHWs to connect people to resources (vaccination resources, food access, transportation, housing support, economic support) and also helps them to get onboarded to digital health programs or telehealth to support their health journey.

Pear Suite’s platform allows the CHW user to build custom care journeys to automate patient support and facilitate person-centered interactions; achieve higher activation rates through personalized recommendations and goal tracking; engage patients using omni-channel communication tools; and track real-time metrics to evaluate impact and drive actionable solutions.  Pear Suite has both SaaS and tech-enabled services lines of business: the SaaS product is used by Pear Suite’s clients for their CHWs and the services product provides outsourced CHWs employed by Pear Suite to supplement the clients’ teams. 

Why We Invested

Pear Suite transforms social determinants of health data into actionable solutions and empowers community health workers to provide culturally sensitive care navigation. Without actionable data, healthcare organizations struggle to address the social drivers of health at scale. Researchers estimate that a lack of data and inaction prevents 20M adults from living at home and costs billions annually.  Pear Suite's cloud-based platform enables anyone to leverage data to better assess and address the social drivers of health in a scalable, cost-effective, and person-centered way. Pear Suite’s Cofounder and CEO, Colby Takeda, is mission driven and has a strong impact orientation to maximize the CHW as a valuable community resource to drive improved health outcomes by addressing often overlooked sociocultural factors that have a strong impact on health. 

Pear Suite has traction with several different customer types. While sales to date have focused on government agencies, Pear Suite is expanding to focus its sales on healthcare organizations and startups as well as payor clients. Pear Suite has developed both a strong SaaS platform as well as a services business to address the multiple facets related to operating in the CHW market. We believe that Pear Suite is differentiated via its focus on CHWs as a key stakeholder in the patient journey with ability to drive impact both in terms of improved outcomes for patients and improved socioeconomic opportunities for the CHWs themselves.

Impact

Pear Suite was founded to address the lack of focus on social factors within healthcare. More specifically, there are many solutions in the healthcare space that aggregate healthcare data, but few are focused on translating social determinants of health (SDoH) data into actions to help individuals address their needs. Existing solutions do not lead to an action on behalf of the member, as solutions typically focus on what the data means to payors or providers. Therefore, Pear Suite seeks to leverage data to assess what actions can support long term outcomes for patients.

Community health workers are uniquely positioned to drive impact as frontline public health workers who typically share ethnicity, language, socioeconomic status, and life experiences with the community members they serve. As a result, they understand the sociocultural needs of that community and can effectively drive better health outcomes. The platform provides resources such as better understanding local food resources, support in accessing SNAP benefits, understanding affordable senior housing options, enrolling in virtual physical activity classes, connecting users to technology classes so that they can better leverage tech to manage their health and so on. 

In addition to the impact in terms of improving health outcomes for the patients that Pear Suite will reach, the company can also create better economic outcomes for CHWs. The CHW role provides a potential path for upward mobility for individuals within a community. CHWs often move on to work as clinicians, nurse practitioners or in government agencies. Therefore, this role provides a meaningful starting point from which to kickstart workers’ careers. 

Why We Invested in LearnLux

By RRahul Bhide

It’s clear that financial wellness is becoming a table-stakes benefit, and the current offerings are no longer enough. Only 22% of Americans feel that they are ‘financially well’. Fiduciary planning and other financial wellness solutions could play a big role in bridging that gap for the other 78% of Americans. It’s not a coincidence that only 16% of Americans use plans built with a financial professional, a similar share to those that consider themselves financially well. Financial planning has long been focused on high-net-worth individuals, and many of the current solutions for low- and middle-income individuals are heavily focused on budgeting tools.

Employers have also identified financial wellness as a key focus area for employee benefits to address the impact on productivity from financial stress, but also to differentiate themselves and retain talent in the wake of the Great Resignation. Surveys done by Bank of America and TIAA demonstrate these trends, with results showing that 95% of employers feel a sense of responsibility for the financial wellness of their employees, up from 81% in 2015. Furthermore, more than 8 in 10 employers agree that financial wellness programs result in greater productivity and more satisfied employees.

Solution

LearnLux is a workplace financial wellbeing provider that blends fiduciary digital planning with access to one-on-one guidance from Certified Financial Planner™ (CFP) professionals. LearnLux's program equips employees with a financial plan to guide them through key decision points across all life events. On the tech platform, employees can complete a quick financial checkup, set goals, and get an individualized financial plan. If employees need more support, they can book a free video call with a CFP. Employees usually start with a check-up to establish a baseline and identify blind spots and priorities. Subsequently, the platform gets into personalized elements such as health insurance and retirement planning.

Once a strong foundation is in place, the platform addresses more sophisticated elements such as savings for real estate, managing education loans and tax optimization. The platform also enables employers to speed up their onboarding process by helping new hires make benefit decisions, communicate the economic value of the benefits they are providing to differentiate themselves from other employers, and drive retention.

Why We Invested

We’ve been really impressed with the founders, the sister-brother duo of Rebecca Liebman (CEO) and Michael Liebman (COO). Both have focused on financial inclusion in different ways throughout their careers so far. LearnLux is serving people across income brackets, and the product was designed from the beginning for both blue collar employees and executives alike, giving LearnLux a differentiated positioning in the market and strengthening the impact potential. So far, customers of LearnLux have been similarly impressed, with all choosing to grow their relationship with LearnLux from year to year. Lastly, we see significant tailwinds as employers prioritize the financial wellness of their employees to reduce stress, improve productivity and retention, and differentiate themselves from other employers.

Impact

LearnLux enables the 78% of Americans that don’t have financial planning support to access unbiased financial planning and advice. We expect LearnLux to drive important results including reduction in financial stress for employees, greater use of pretax products, on-time retirement, and healthcare savings. LearnLux is inclusive across all ages, income levels, and job types; and the employee base it serves includes traditionally hard to reach populations like manufacturing, construction, retail and hourly workers.

Why We Invested in Twentyeight Health

By Sophia Friedman

There are significant barriers to accessing healthcare for low-income women and specifically for women of color. Some figures make clear these challenges: 45% of 18-29 year olds do not have a primary care physician; one in three doctors don’t accept new Medicaid patients; and, there are at least 72M women of reproductive age in the United States.

Specifically, access to quality sexual and reproductive healthcare is critical for the health and wellbeing of women, yet many women in the United States struggle to access quality and timely care. As a result, unintended pregnancy rates are 3x higher and maternal mortality is 2x higher for low-income women. While the gaps in access to care are clear, few solutions within the women’s health space cater specifically to underserved women, and as a result, many women struggle to access essential health services.

Solution

Twentyeight Health is a women's health platform focused on increasing access to reproductive and sexual health care for underserved communities.  Twentyeight targets a large, underserved market as there are 38M underserved women in need of women’s health access. Medicaid alone spends over $200B on healthcare for women of reproductive age. Twentyeight’s vision is to become the digital healthcare home for women, building trust early and providing care throughout a woman’s lifetime via telemedicine, medication delivery and ongoing care. Twentyeight provides medically accurate, accessible, convenient healthcare and currently offers various methods of contraception, emergency contraception, prenatal vitamins, and STD treatments, amongst other services. Twentyeight is available today in 34 states and in Washington DC. In 2021, Twentyeight launched full Spanish language telehealth services for their healthcare offerings to cater to Spanish speakers, a largely underserved population as a Health Affairs study published in 2021 shows that Spanish speakers receive approximately one-third less care than other Americans.  

Twentyeight has been strategic in its go to market strategy by initially offering contraceptive care to underserved women via its direct-to-consumer approach. As a result, Twentyeight developed strong relationships with thousands of women as a trusted healthcare provider while also gathering meaningful data around underserved women and their habits and health needs. Because Twentyeight builds long term relationships with their users by providing subscription-based access to birth control, the company is uniquely positioned to provide care coordination when users want to pause birth control and may be thinking about conception (or already pregnant). This fills a significant gap for health plans who want to proactively offer additional services to women at appropriate times to improve maternal outcomes and reduce costs but often cannot due so because of the lack of member engagement and accurate data. Now that Twentyeight has developed a strong foothold via its initial product offerings, it has expanded its healthcare offerings, such as herpes treatments, prenatal vitamins and emergency contraception. Twentyeight developed its own proprietary platform to easily engage with users, their provider network and their pharmacy partners. Additionally, the scalable platform will allow them to easily add additional healthcare offerings to the business.

Why We Invested

Twentyeight is specifically focused on reaching historically underserved populations via its platform and increasing access to health products and services for low income women. We found Twentyeight to be differentiated from other players offering digital health solutions to address women’s health for two main reasons:

1. Many women’s health solutions are point solutions - solutions that address and deliver on one specific need, often in isolation. However, while point solutions can target specific parts of the patient journey, it is important to keep in mind the holistic health of the woman in order to drive outcomes. Therefore, we are excited about Twentyeight’s approach to building a women’s health platform because we believe that winners will be solutions that address the woman’s whole health and/or integrate with other solutions to support various social and medical factors that may affect a woman’s health throughout various phases of her life.

2. A majority of the women’s health solutions currently in the market are offered as direct to consumer products that women pay for out of pocket. As a result, these solutions are often price prohibitive to underserved populations and therefore cater predominately to middle and high income populations. Therefore, low income women are typically unable to access these solutions. While Twentyeight has both direct to consumer and B2B business models, the services Twentyeight is offering are mostly fully reimbursed and so women do not pay out of pocket to access Twentyeight. Therefore, Twentyeight is reaching a population that has historically struggled to access these types of healthcare services. 

Beyond reproductive health, Twentyeight seeks to increase women’s access to healthcare more broadly. The company aims to empower individuals with information, affordable access and convenience for their reproductive and sexual health. Twentyeight is comprised of doctors, public health experts, designers, engineers and builders who are committed to changing the face of healthcare for underserved communities. 

Impact

We believe that Twentyeight can reach populations that have historically struggled to interact with the health system to improve health outcomes for women. Twentyeight’s user demographics indicate their success in engaging underserved populations: of Twentyeight’s users, 58% identify as BIPOC, 59% live in non-urban areas and 55% of users are on Medicaid.  63% of Twentyeight’s users report that they did not have access to birth control prior to joining Twentyeight.  Overall, Twentyeight has impact on various levels: the company can reach populations that have historically been left out of the health system (underserved, low income women), help to prevent unintended pregnancies, and bring women into the health system for regular visits and preventive care to identify conditions or illnesses at an earlier stage to improve outcomes and lower costs.

Why We Invested in Perfect Power

By Chris Wu

The electric grid is transitioning from a centralized system, to one that is more distributed, renewable and accessible. New regulations, renewable energy mandates, tighter environmental regulations, the electrical grid’s evolving load profile, as well as the increased intermittency of our energy supply as more renewable energy comes online all serve to usher in a paradigm shift in the 100 year old energy grid. 

The US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) will dramatically reshape the makeup of electricity production in the US in the coming decades. The new law is a game changer for renewable energy development and energy storage installations; it is estimated that the IRA will more than triple US clean energy production and result in 40% of the country’s energy coming from renewable sources. In order to achieve this rapid transformation an additional 550 GW of electricity must be generated via renewable sources in less than 10 years time. In other words, meeting the emissions reduction goals of the IRA will hinge on the US’ ability to at least double the rate of renewable installations over the record levels observed in 2020 and 2021. 

Perfect Power strives to be a next-generation, clean-focused project developer, and is well positioned to serve the electric grid during this critical point in the clean energy transition. Perfect Power’s mission is to acquire, develop, and opportunistically own and operate, a differentiated portfolio of dispatchable low-carbon generating assets which accelerate the transition of the power grid to a faster, safer, more reliable, and lower carbon future.

Solution

Perfect Power acquires, develops or redevelops, owns, and operates electric power generation assets. The company is focused solely on assets that enable the decarbonization of the electrical grid, specifically renewable energy generation and battery energy storage. Perfect Power finds attractive locations to build large solar or battery projects, takes control of those sites, and performs all the development work needed in order to get that project to a point where it has achieved its full “Notice to Proceed” (NTP) milestone and has the green light to proceed with construction/installation. At that point, Perfect Power has the option to either sell that project at a markup to a strategic or larger developer who would then proceed to invest the money necessary to build and operate the solar or energy storage project, or they have the option to build and operate the asset themselves. The buyer would be acquiring an asset that has had the development risk removed and is ready to immediately begin construction or installation.

The company looks to develop a geographically diverse portfolio in markets that are accessible, liquid, tradeable and compensatory such as ERCOT (in Texas) and CAISO (in California). Perfect Power develops utility scale front of the meter assets that have transmission or distribution system interconnection points. It can also opportunistically pursue commercial and industrial (C&I) projects in select markets that require dispatch to obtain payments, as well as distributed front of the meter assets interconnected to participate in the wholesale electric generation market. Perfect Power is able to aggregate and build a portfolio of energy storage projects at a significantly lower entry price and with relatively low overhead expenses given its business model and personnel’s expertise. Perfect Power currently owns, or has exclusivity, on a wide variety of development-stage projects including a pipeline of up to 200 MW of distributed energy storage projects, 300 MW of utility-scale solar projects & 250 MW of utility-scale energy storage projects in ERCOT, as well as a pipeline of up to 325 MW distributed energy storage projects in CAISO.

Why We Invested

Perfect Power has a proven team with deep expertise in power generation, renewable energy and energy storage in key markets, as well as a proven track record of asset development and management. Perfect Power was formed and is wholly owned by SER Capital, who handpicked the company’s leadership team. In addition, the SER Capital team has over 100 years of private equity experience in this space as well as senior executive level operating experience at both private and public companies in the energy industry that will be invaluable as they partner with management to help the company scale and grow. 

We were impressed by Perfect Power’s ability to aggregate and build a sizable portfolio of energy storage and solar projects at a significantly lower entry price and with much lower overhead expenses than it would cost to acquire an established platform. We see an opportunity for Perfect Power’s platform to develop a differentiated portfolio of dispatchable low carbon generating assets which accelerate the transition of the power grid to a faster, safer, more reliable, and lower carbon future. As the electric grid is transitioning from high carbon intensity (e.g. coal-fired power plants) to a low carbon intensity; batteries will enable the integration of renewable energy and other resources based on demand instead of simply dispatching when the resources are available. We also were attracted to the flexibility of Perfect Power’s platform to either sell or build its projects, which gives it a distinct advantage. 

Impact

In order to achieve the greenhouse gas reductions (GHG) needed to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and avoid the worst effects of climate change, we must scale up renewable energy capacity at a rapid pace. Today electricity production makes up about 25% of the United State’s total GHG emissions given that approximately 60% of our electricity still comes from burning fossil fuels - primarily coal and natural gas. Perfect Power’s platform will enable more than 1 GW of renewable energy generation, energy storage, and efficiency improvements to be built and come online, which will help decarbonize the grid by displacing GHG intensive forms of energy generation such as combined cycle gas or coal plants. The environmental impacts of solar generation are immediate and material as a true zero-carbon source of energy. Energy storage plays a critical role in integrating intermittent renewable energy into the grid. Together battery energy storage paired with solar generation forms a strong combination that provides reliable and clean power at scale for the energy grid.

Why We Invested in Watershed Health

By Sophia Friedman

Hospital readmissions place a large burden on the healthcare system. Each year, hospital readmissions cost payors ~$40B in disbursements and hospitals ~$560M in penalties alone. Many hospital readmissions are avoidable, and there has been an increased focus on reducing hospital readmissions to improve patient outcomes and reduce costs.

For example, the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP) is a Medicare value-based purchasing program that “encourages hospitals to improve communication and care coordination to better engage patients and caregivers in discharge plans and, in turn, reduce avoidable readmissions.”  As can be seen in the HRRP’s mission, care coordination is a key consideration in improving outcomes and reducing readmissions. The care coordination market, which seeks to minimize the number of avoidable hospital readmissions, is large and growing.

Solution

Watershed Health is a community-wide care collaboration platform which connects clinical and non-clinical care teams to facilitate communication, streamline the exchange of data and improve care management.  For this reason, Watershed is an optimal tool in the post-acute environment where it is used to manage the hand-offs between acute and post-acute care providers, enabling better continuity of care and sharing of data (including around the social determinants of health) to reduce readmissions and improve outcomes for patients. Specific stakeholders include hospitals, medical transportation providers, home health, in-patient rehab, and skilled-nursing facilities. Watershed interfaces with any electronic health record (EHR) through a simple, universal connector to create real-time data exchange between the various involved stakeholders (acute and post-acute care providers).  The platform improves care coordination and reduces readmissions, thereby improving health outcomes, enables transparency and optimizes post-acute care networks.

Why We Invested

Whereas existing solutions simply collect health data, Watershed takes into consideration the needs of various stakeholders to continuously measure provider collaboration and patient outcomes. As a next generation platform, Watershed is designed for all providers in both acute care settings (hospitals and health systems) and post-acute care settings (including home health, in-patient rehab, skilled-nursing facilities) to drive improved outcomes for patients and cost reductions for health plans. Watershed is directly driving impact by supporting the transition to value based care.  The platform aggregates member data and gives providers real time insights to manage care transitions in order to transition patients from acute care centers back into their communities. Watershed gives  providers actionable insights needed to act in real time and the tools to collaborate across care settings to improve patient outcomes.

Watershed’s leadership team consists of healthcare experts with longstanding experience in their respective fields and strong industry networks that will prove useful in Watershed’s growth. The team has specific expertise on the transition to value based care, sales executives with experience scaling similar models and physicians with first hand knowledge of the patient journey and the unmet needs in this space. The team complements one another and each brings a unique set of skills and experiences that will help the company through its next phase of growth. 

Impact

Watershed’s referral management and data & analytics platform drives better patient outcomes.

• As an example, Watershed’s platform helped one hospice agency reduce the time between hospital discharge and hospice intake from 36 hours to 5 hours, resulting in a drastic reduction in 30-day readmission rate from 10.6% to 2.8%.

• One of Watershed’s initial clients experienced a sustained decline in the 30-day hospital readmission rate: before Watershed, the hospital readmission rate in the region was approximately 18%. After a two-year rollout and expansion period, hospital readmission has dropped to between 9% and 11%.

Watershed has a unique ability to directly impact patient outcomes by improving care transitions and therefore reducing readmissions rates. Watershed has a significant amount of data and metrics that it aggregates on a regular basis which will prove helpful in better understanding how Watershed drives improved outcomes and lowers the cost of care. 

Why We Invested in Acelero

By Rahul Bhide

Early childhood education (ECE) is critical for educational outcomes; 90% of brain development happens before the age of 5. Studies have shown that high-quality ECE interventions result in improved academic achievement, cognitive development, emotional development, and self-regulation. Furthermore, ECE benefits accrued over children’s lifetime include improved earning potential and economic opportunity, as well as reductions in public and private healthcare expenditure. The absence of ECE is also strongly felt; a child without ECE is 25% more likely to drop out of school, 40% more likely to become a teenage parent, 60% more likely to never attend college, and 70% more likely to be arrested for violent crime.

The supply of ECE in the US is severely hampered, with existing providers lacking adequate capacity, further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. 51% of Americans live in a child care desert, largely low-income and minority communities.

Solution

Acelero is an ECE platform serving low income communities, as a direct operator of Head Start (HS) centers (Acelero Learning) and via tech-enabled services to other HS operators (Shine Early Learning) and states and municipalities (Shine Advance).

Acelero started operating HS centers in 2005, focusing on closing the Achievement Gap by delivering high-quality educational outcomes, and have been nationally recognized for their results. 

Building on their years of direct teaching and operating experience, they launched Shine Early Learning in 2011, sharing best practices and providing critical infrastructure to other Head Start operators nationwide. Small-scale studies of educational outcomes with Shine Early Learning partners results have been extremely positive. Looking to make a deeper impact on the early childhood education system at scale, in 2019, they launched Shine Advance to support state and municipal governments to improve the quality of early education providers under their jurisdiction, through IP and tech-enabled services.

Acelero operates 54 centers in 4 states, directly serving 5,000 children annually; and through their work with state agencies, child care centers, home-based providers, private and public pre-K and Head Start and Early Head Start programs, they impact more than 150,000 children and their families across 28 states and territories.

Why We Invested

Acelero’s CEO, Henry Wilde, was a co-founder of the organization 20 years ago. He is extremely mission-aligned, knows the early childhood space very well, and is backed by a veteran management team of 28 comprised of recognized and diverse leaders in the field committed to the outcomes-based business model, leading curriculum development and comprehensive support for teachers, families and students, with 1500+ other employees.

Acelero has a strong and proven direct center business model built over their 20 year history, along with a unique solution set. They have developed a strong, four-pronged early learning framework, comprised of educational content, teaching, family engagement, and data-driven management. Acelero operates in a large, but heavily fragmented early childhood education and childcare market, where both quality and technology adoption levels are highly variable. This positions an established, technology-forward player like Acelero well to succeed in this market.

Beyond directly operating Head Start centers, the organization is uniquely positioned to serve Shine clients from other Head Start providers to a diverse set of state and municipal governments, and the strong traction they have achieved to date speaks to that. 

Impact

We believe that high-quality early childhood education imparted directly (via Acelero directly-operated centers) and indirectly (via Shine Early Learning/Advance) will be critical in closing the achievement gap for low-income children, and contributing to increased economic mobility. We have confidence that they will be able to do this because they are one of the only players in the space with best-in-class externally validated outcomes, with Acelero students outperforming the Head Start standards by 2.9 - 4.7x on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. The impact of the Acelero/Shine model has also been demonstrated at scale. They have been repeatedly recognized as a Head Start exemplar by the Office of Head Start, and studies performed by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University have regularly measured the improvement in outcomes delivered by Acelero since 2015, including some of the highest ever outcomes gains ever recorded in a Head Start program.  

Furthermore, we believe that Acelero, through its rigorous professional development model and upskilling program for Acelero employees, enables increased economic opportunity for employees in low-income areas. At a systems change level, we also believe that proving that a high quality, for-profit, PE-backed model can work in early-childhood education will catalyze the space and education investing in the US.

Why We Invested in Dandi

By Rahul Bhide

Workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is important not only because it is the right thing for organizations to do but also because it can deliver improved business outcomes: HBR has been writing about that linkage since 1996. Employees also care about DEI; 76% of employees and job seekers said diversity was important when considering job offers. Amidst successful votes for racial equity audits at firms like McDonald’s, Apple, Johnson & Johnson and Home Depot, it is increasingly clear that there is a significant appetite to understand where to focus future efforts and whether DEI initiatives are generating meaningful results.

According to CultureAmp’s 2022 Workplace DEI Landscape report, although most organizations (83%) are collecting DEI data, only a handful are analyzing pay equity (only 15% do it more than once a year) and performance equity (only 29% do it once per cycle, all others less than once per cycle or never). Data sharing is limited: only 34% of companies share DEI data outside of the executive team. Most importantly, less than half of organizations actually used DEI data to make decisions, despite wanting to do so. Organizations keen to make data-driven DEI/HR decisions are hampered by existing HR information systems’ data sharing limitations and static analysis that often relies on analysts manually gathering data and running analyses periodically.

Solution

Dandi is the data analytics platform for DEI, enabling organizations to make data-driven DEI decisions. Dandi starts by pulling in information from any major HR information system or data store, and then allows anyone from CEOs to DEI teams to analyze the organization at a macro level and drill down for specific intersectional insights. Dandi is also launching a user-friendly tool to allow non-technical employees the ability to import new data files/feeds, and define new metrics.

Why We Invested

The founding team at Dandi is one of the strongest we've seen in the DEI space. Building on extensive technical backgrounds and a deep knowledge of the HR tech space, they’ve developed a best-in-class product. Dandi is able to work with all major HR information systems and data stores, and includes powerful dashboards to move from high-level to granular analysis, exportable reports, and regularly refreshed data.

Despite not having officially launched, Dandi has secured several early customers through the founding team’s network and received sustained inbound interest from companies very interested in what they have to offer, building early traction while being extremely capital efficient.

Impact

We believe that Dandi will enable employers to become more diverse, equitable and inclusive by enabling more accurate, more granular, more automated, and more accessible DEI analysis. There is also the potential for Dandi to collect the data to be able to link business performance to DEI at a granular level, which could be game-changing from an impact perspective. Additionally, as Dandi reaches significant scale, its aggregated (and anonymized) dataset will be an enormously valuable source of insights for HR/DEI teams, leadership teams, and policymakers.

We’ve seen Dandi in action and the results are significant for early applications; after one client engaged with Dandi, they identified and reduced gender pay gaps from 10% to 2.5%. After being deployed at another company, voluntary data collection for ethnicities went from 25% to 90%+ in a quarter. At another client, Dandi identified pay gaps between those who identified as primary caregivers and those who didn’t, and was able to support the client in addressing those.