Notation Capital puts money into education

Maybe Step 1 for getting kids to learn is just making sure they’re in school.
Brooklyn’s Notation Capital announced last week its investment in education startup Kinvolved. We’ve covered the edtech company a few times, including this profile from September 2014. (A Notation tweet from January may have been first to break the news. It pointed to a New York Times profile of “port co” Kinvolved.)
The app is essentially a tool for allowing parents, teachers and administrators to better communicate about their child’s attendance. It’s personalized, it’s data-driven and it can go right to the phone of a parent, rather than a mailer or in-person conference.

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“I was a teacher in a NYC high school and noticed absenteeism was a huge problem from the first day I stood in front of my students,” Kinvolved cofounder Miriam Altman wrote in an announcement. “I realized that parents, an essential partner to help get kids to class, were often uninformed of their children’s attendance or absence for six weeks or longer after the absence occurred. When parents were informed, I saw immediate improvements in attendance and academic performance, but didn’t have the tools at the time to communicate this critical information to parents in large volumes.”
When we last checked in with Notation the firm was growing. It had just added four new part-time partners, including a journalist and the former CTO of Etsy.