Our Story

Ensure every child has access to a great education.

Avela envisions a world where everyone has equal access to high quality education.

Avela empowers district leaders and education administrators to boost enrollment, streamline operations, support families, and promote equity using research-proven approaches.

For far too long, a child’s destiny has been determined by their zip code. Public education was designed to democratize access to knowledge and close the achievement gap, but has fallen short. Avela partners with schools, districts, nonprofits, and governments to empower families and ensure everyone has equal access.

Company

Avela is an education software company and consulting practice focused on equity in school enrollment and admissions.

Avela offers a complete student application and enrollment solution for education providers, including PK-12 schools, districts, and CMOs. The Avela Enroll Suite covers all stages of the enrollment journey, including discovery, application, admission, and registration. Our products and services include:

Avela Explore - School finder with rich profiles, robust search, and bookmarks to empower families to find schools for their children.
Avela Apply - Application system with parent portal for streamlined applications and admin portal for workflow management.
Avela Match - Student assignment and admission lottery platform leveraging Nobel Prize algorithms for accuracy and equity.
Avela Consulting - Consulting and advisory services to promote best practices, design equitable policies, and implement and integrate these solutions

Avela was founded in 2019 by Nobel Laureate Josh Angirst, Clark Medalist Parag Pathak, and Social Entrepreneur Greg Bybee to empower districts to boost enrollment, streamline operations, support families, and promote equity using research-proven approaches.

School districts see a 90% reduction in the number of dissatisfied families when using our approaches. This has real learning implications - Josh and Parag’s research at MIT showed that students who enrolled in their first choice school improved math achievement by 0.4 standard deviations!

Avela’s clients includes public school districts (New Orleans, Seattle, Hartford, Tulsa, etc), charter enrollment nonprofits (Oakland Enrolls, Newark Common App, etc), education nonprofits (Teach for America, Agenda for Children, etc), and state/local governments (Philadelphia, Louisiana, etc.).

Avela’s work extends beyond education to support more equitable matching and placements in other social impact sectors, including government services, volunteer placements, medicine, and military staffing.

Avela is committed to ecosystem interoperability and has signed the Project Unicorn pledge and implements the 1EDTECH standards.

Founding Story

Avela brings together decades of Nobel Prize winning research by our founders, Josh Angrist and Parag Pathak, in partnership with school district leaders and technologists, to scale best practices through technology.

Through their research lab at MIT, Blueprint Labs (then known as the School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative), Josh Angrist and Parag Pathak have been working with high performing school districts since 2000 to design equitable enrollment processes and student assignment mechanisms, and improve accountability and value added metrics.

Together with colleagues Alvin Roth (Stanford) and Atila Abdulkadiroglu (Duke), and NYC Director of Enrollment Research Sonali Murarka Soi, they helped to transform the New York City Department of Education’s approach to school choice. With their approach, 30,000 students, roughly one-third of applicants, were able to choose their preferred school in New York. Al Roth won the Nobel Prize in 2012 in part for that work.

Since then, they have worked with dozens of districts, including Boston, Denver, Tulsa, Camden, and Chicago. In partnership with Tayfun Sönmez (Boston College), they identified equity issues with the Boston match, and developed a new system for controlled choice.

In 2007, Parag co-founded the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice (IIPSC), a nonprofit focused on unified enrollment across our nation’s urban school districts, with Neil Dorosin (NYC DOE), Roth, and Abdulkadiroglu. Together, they developed matching software used by districts across the country, including Chicago, Denver, Indianapolis, and Washington DC.

Parag won the John Bates Clark Medal in 2018 and Josh earned the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2021, partially for this work.

Parag and Josh worked for years to spread these best practices. They advised several of the legacy enrollment companies, including SmartChoice and SchoolMint. They also helped convene the Unified Enrollment Leaders Network (UELN), and in 2019, they launched the MIT School Access and Quality Fellowship (SAQF). They quickly realized that a more scalable approach was needed to help thousands of districts quickly adopt more equitable practices.

So, in 2020, Josh and Parag partnered with Greg Bybee, a social entrepreneur and education reformer from Silicon Valley, to found Avela to scale this groundbreaking work across the country through technology.

Avela quickly built a strong team of practitioners and technologists and launched an award winning school finder (Avela Explore) and matching platform (Avela Match) the next year. Just one year later, our end-to-end enrollment platform, Avela Apply, launched.

In just two years, we’ve already worked with some of the nation’s largest school districts (New Orleans, Seattle, Hartford, Tulsa, etc), charter enrollment nonprofits (Oakland Enrolls, Newark Common App, etc), education nonprofits (Teach for America, Agenda for Children, etc), and state/local governments (Philadelphia, Louisiana, etc.).

With that momentum, we just raised a $6.4 million seed financing round, and are now rapidly growing our team, product, and client base.

Team

Avela is proud to be a diverse, majority employee-owned company.

We are a passionate team of entrepreneurs, engineers, and economists. We were founded by Parag, Josh, and Greg, who share a vision for public education to prioritize equity, accountability, and quality. Our team includes a Nobel Laureate, Clark Medalist, Siebel Scholar, the former Executive Director of Enrollment in Oakland and NYC, DEI specialists, and the best engineering team in the country.

Everyone is passionate about improving our education system and empowering families and the administrators who make it possible. We are growing quickly and would love to meet you. Please visit our careers page to view open roles.