Why We Invested in Journify Learning

They would come in batches. Ten or twenty per minute during some stretches. During the peak season when special education teachers reviewed the annual plans (IEPs) required for each of their students, hundreds of messages would pour in, at all hours of the night.

Those evenings spent helping them are among the most formative memories from my first job, launching and supporting special ed compliance software in cities across America. It was jarring to discover that every IEP required a teacher to manually reconcile data from systems that had never been built to talk to each other. Teacher time was the integration layer, and it came at the expense of instructional time. It offered an illuminating lesson in my early career: good education technology should dissolve the distance between educators and their students.

I have spent the years since as an investor believing that someone would eventually build the product that made this work unnecessary. Mara Steiu and Sagar Manchanda have, and the wait is over.

Mara and Sagar are the co-founders of Journify Learning, an evidence-based AI assistant for special education that automates paperwork, integrates with all support providers, and simplifies compliance efforts. We are pleased to lead Journify's seed round, alongside Ulu Ventures and Charter School Growth Fund.

Journify joins a portfolio of Reach companies working to serve students and teachers most underserved by the status quo. Special education has experienced the largest teacher shortage in the country for as long as the federal government has been tracking it, with 45 states reporting deficits in 2025. Two thirds of public schools cannot fully staff their programs. The teachers who do stay devote up to half their working day to paperwork and compliance administration rather than instruction.

Active in schools across 17 states, Journify currently supports over 10,000 students. Teachers report saving more than four hours per day, and rate the quality of instructional supports 9.5 out of 10. Most recently, at the ASU GSV Cup, the most competitive edtech startup competition, Journify won the K-12 track out of more than 3,000 submissions.

The company's growth, demand and love from educators will not be surprising to anyone who has met Mara and Sagar. The foundation was laid in Reach co-founder Jennifer Carolan's Lean Launchpad course at Stanford, where the duo spent weeks inside schools with teachers before writing a single line of code. They devoured feedback through hundreds of customer discovery calls in a matter of months, quickly iterating early ideas into a platform that delights special ed teachers across the country.

For them, Journify is a personal journey. Mara grew up in a family of educators. Her mother and grandmother were both public school teachers, and she attended public schools. That proximity gave an understanding of what the system feels like from inside it. She later founded her first K-12 edtech startup while still in high school and carried that commitment to Stanford's Graduate School of Education.

Sagar comes to this work with equal conviction. Also raised in a family of educators, he watched his grandmother run a school in India with relentless dedication to her students and teachers - something she still does today, even from her bed in old age. Seeing firsthand how deeply educators care, and how much they sacrifice, left a lasting impression. As he built his career in enterprise software, he felt a strong desire to apply his technical expertise to education.

He and Mara met at Microsoft, where he was a senior software engineer and she was a product manager. Their shared belief that special education was one of the most complex and underserved problems in K-12 drew them toward the same question: Why had nobody brought serious engineering and product thinking to a category that had been managed by unwieldy compliance logic for decades?

Mara and Sagar are doing exactly that, and we're proud to be part of what comes next. The team is growing; they're looking for a Founding Engineer. And if you're a special education teacher or district leader interested in learning more, please connect with Journify!