Our Mission: Empowering Teachers to Reach Every Student

That phrase is our mission and our tagline, but what does that mean to us? The word “reach,” to us, means two different things:

• Access – Is the learning experience accessible to the student?
• Personalization – Is the learning experience personalized?

Our team has been building online learning solutions for decades and though we’ve always been proud of what we built, we also knew that online learning – in its historic form – was an awkward fit for schools because:

• It couldn’t reach students without the internet (wifi) at home.
• It was one-size-fits-all, with simple branching (at best) to personalize learning.
• It leveraged creator tools that were incredibly complicated and expensive.
• It evolved out of corporate “check the box” compliance training.
• It was stuck within the box of a laptop, course player, and learning management system.

In building Hello PLATO, we’ve aimed to address all of these shortcomings. The creator tool is super-easy for teachers to use. The delivery is mobile-native to reach students who only have cell phones. And the use of messaging makes the learning available in low bandwidth for those without wifi. We’ve also broken online learning out of the “box,” laying the groundwork for lessons that can occur anywhere and anytime. But most importantly, we’re using conversational AI to personalize student learning over time by providing a GPS to teachers, students, and parents around student progress, student confidence/sentiment, and content performance.

Our Team

Hi, I’m Rachel Fisher, co-founder and CEO of Hello PLATO. My co-founders Julie Lutz and Brent Fisher previously co-founded, built, and exited an online learning company in the K12 space, EDTRAININGCENTER, to Frontline Education. All of us then stayed on to help build the rare Edtech unicorn that Frontline became just two years later. It was an incredibly humbling and educational experience.

Following that exit, we put our heads together with brilliant friends in the space to come up with something completely novel in Hello PLATO. Those brilliant friends include:

• Ray Kelly (Chairman of the Board) – Ray has built and exited four international edtech companies, including his last, Graduation Alliance, which was focused on reducing dropout rates and funded by GSV Ventures and New Markets Ventures.
• Chuck Gries (our CTO) – Chuck has two decades of deep hands-on experience building global online learning solutions that scale. He and Skip Marshall (below) also helped build, and “double-exit” an online learning company in the corporate space before starting InTech Ideas and worked with us in our last company.
• Steve Tingiris (Advisor) – One of the world’s leading experts on conversational AI, Steve is a classic inventor and has created and sold products being used to drive nine figures in revenue today and is actively working with the tech giants in the area of Education + AI.
• Skip Marshall (Advisor) – Along with our CTO, Skip has been delivering global online learning solutions at scale for over a decade.
• Iddo Tal (Advisor) – Iddo is a serial entrepreneur who sold his messaging company, Invi, to Google and who recently began his own fundraising education program for early-stage founders.
• Dr. Sara Baker (Advisor) – An advocate of distributed schools that leverage virtual, blended, and in-person learning as needed to help children reach the full potential, Sara is licensed for, and has served as, a classroom teacher, principal, and Superintendent in both brick-and-mortar and virtual school environments. She’s done it all.

Together we bring deep expertise across several disciplines: online learning, conversational learning, AI, and messaging. That combination is what gives us the novel solution that is Hello PLATO.

It’s time for online learning to break out of its historic box to meet learners where they are all around the world!