Our 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, SEII), 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, building on the work of Michael Alves.

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.

Josh earned the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2021 and Parag won the John Bates Clark Medal in 2018 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 2019, Josh and Parag approached Eric Schmidt and the Schmidt Futures team for funding to launch a company to help educators implement the best practices they were researching. Originally called Matchmaker Information Technologies, an homage to MIT and emphasizing the orginal work on matching students to schools, Avela was founded in 2019. In 2020, they partnered with Greg Bybee, a social entrepreneur and education reformer from Silicon Valley, to launch Avela to scale this groundbreaking work across the country through technology.

MatchTech was rebranded to Avela in 2020. Avela quickly built a strong team of practitioners and technologists and launched an award winning school finder (Avela Explore) and lottery/matching platform (Avela Match) the next year in 2021. Just one year later, our end-to-end enrollment platform (Avela Apply) launched, and the following year we rolled out the registration module (Avela Enroll). These products are now modules of a single enrollment platform.

We’ve already worked with some of the nation’s largest school districts (Philadelphia, Boston, etc), charter enrollment nonprofits (Oakland Enrolls, Newark Common App, etc), charter networks (KIPP, IEM, etc), education nonprofits (Teach for America, Agenda for Children, etc), and state/local governments (Philadelphia, Louisiana, etc.).

Building on that momentum, we raised a $6.4 million seed financing round in 2022, and have used that funding to fuel our growth. We are thankful to our investors, including Ulu Ventures, Cherubic Venture, Schmidt Futures, Urban Innovation Fund, and Learn Capital. We are also thankful to our angel investors including Jennifer Carolan (Reach Capital), Dan Carroll (Clever), Ed Miller (Blackboard/Class), David Stewart (TEMBO/Hoonuit), KD Venture Partners, the Oxford Angel Fund, and many more.