Former KC startup eyes nationwide education revamp with merger

About a year after a move from Kansas City to St. Louis, education tech firm myEDmatch has merged with a nationwide teacher recruitment platform.

Led by CEO Alicia Herald, myEDmatch will combine its platform connecting teachers and school job openings with St. Louis-based Teachers-Teachers, a firm that focuses on teacher recruitment. The new, yet-to-be-named entity will combine to form one of the nation’s largest teacher candidate databases.

Herald said that the new business will be better positioned to have a broader, more positive impact on education across the U.S.

“Teachers-Teachers brings scale in terms of a large database and we bring an innovative product with our technology and matching algorithm,” she said. “If you look at the direction and future of where teacher recruitment is heading, we wanted to bring the innovation along with it to add to their scale. It puts us closer to the time where we’re improving education across the country by giving teachers more of what they deserve.”

MyEDmatch created a platform that better connects teachers with school positions to help with retention. Teacher attrition costs school districts roughly $7.3 billion each year, according to The National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future.

Founded in 1999 by Jason Froelich, Teachers-Teachers has a roster of more than 1 million teachers in its teacher recruitment database. The new tech firm will serve more than 2,000 school districts across the country. Herald will serve as the chief strategy and innovation officer of the new entity while Teachers-Teachers’ Froelich will serve as CEO.

Herald declined to provide details on the financial value of the merger. The new company has more than 25 employees and plans to continue hiring in 2016.

A graduate of the entrepreneurial fellowship program Pipeline and a native of Kansas City, Herald has strong ties to the area. Herald is currently a senior fellow in education innovation at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and was also the former executive director at Teach for America in Kansas City.

When founded in 2012, myEDmatch found its launch in the Barkley building, located in Kansas City’s Crossroads Arts District.

“We were born out of a basement,” she said. “Thank you, Barkley, for giving us your free coffee.”

Herald said that ultimately her connections in St. Louis prompted her to relocate the company about a year ago. Mentors like Build-A-Bear founder Maxine Clark took Herald under their wings, which helped move myEDmatch to St. Louis.

“It was more than raising a Series A round — capital was important — but I wouldn’t say there wasn’t capital in Kansas City,” Herald said of her decision to relocate the firm. “My local board (in St. Louis) and the access to folks in St. Louis was helpful.”