The Wire
Posts
The Wire | Issue 02

The Wire | Issue 02

Cross-country hacking and building our healthcare stack

Valentina Suarez & Tony Wan
February 19th, 2025

Welcome to the Reach Wire. Each month, we deliver fresh insights into the world of learning, health, and work — combining news and data we’re tracking, perspectives from the team at Reach Capital, and updates from our portfolio. Subscribe for the latest.

To find where the next great technologies are born and built, go to where great teaching, learning, and hacking happens.

Earlier this month, Reach partnered with Major League Hacking to see what students could build with AI across seven hackathons in Montreal, Virginia Tech, Rutgers, Brown, New York University, Carnegie Mellon, and Michigan State. What we saw: a feedback tool that analyzes real-time audience engagement to improve communication skills; a way to automate insurance billing and save doctors hours of paperwork; and a memory companion to help those with memory loss reconnect with the people and memories that matter most. And so, so much more.

It’s incredible and inspiring what students can build in a weekend. The next wave of delightfully disruptive tools won’t be confined to the usual tech hubs like Silicon Valley — and they certainly won’t be limited to the domain of “professional” coders either (see “Slacking off” section below).

Reach hackathons (thank you MLH!)

A warm welcome to our healthcare advisors! We’re thrilled to announce three healthcare industry experts who will help us keep abreast of market trends and opportunities: AdventHealth’s Chief AI Officer Rob Purinton, Brightside Health’s Chief Operating Officer Julia Bernstein, and Adina Safer, an exited healthcare founder (acquired by CVS) and seasoned strategist who sits on the Board of the San Francisco Health Plan.

From the portfolio

Latest Deals

Dropback • Financial infrastructure for college athletic departments • $1.6 million pre-seed from Reach Capital, Y Combinator, and Twenty Two Ventures. (Sports Illustrated)

MagicSchool • AI co-pilot for schools, teachers, and students • $45 million Series B led by Valor Equity Partners; we first invested in their pre-seed in 2023. (MagicSchool blog)

Scout • Financial literacy for athletes • New funding round puts its total to $6 million raised to date. New investors include Andy Katz and Jim Briles; we first invested in pre-seed in 2022. (Press release)

Wins & News

Newsela is expanding its product suite beyond English language arts after acquiring Generation Genius, a provider of K-8 science and math instructional materials, in a deal valued at $100 million.

The Arizona Department of Education is partnering with Cartwheel to create a fully-funded program that provides mental health support to all school districts and charter schools in the state’s 13 rural counties.

Innovamat has partnered with Building Thinking Classrooms to offer pedagogically rigorous instructional resources that help teachers create math lessons that foster student thinking, curiosity, and problem solving.

Which AI apps are users spending the most time on? Among those on Reveal’s top 20 list are coding platform Replit at #3 (with an average of 13 minutes 42 seconds) and AI detection and writing assistant GPTZero at #4.

Slacking off

Stories we’re buzzing about in the office.

“We don’t care about professional coders anymore.”

So says Amjad Masad. In a recent profile for Semafor, the CEO and co-founder of Replit (a Reach portfolio company) reflected on his surprise at how quickly AI has made it possible for anyone to build and deploy software simply with natural language prompts. Future programmers may never need to set up a Git environment or know Python; a more valuable skill, he believes, will be knowing how to identify problems that software can solve.

There’s a little irony that the saber-rattling quote came from a prolific coder leading one of the most tech-savvy teams in Silicon Valley. But the reality is that just as software has eaten the world, AI is eating software. It’s capable of producing work on par with mid-level coders. Zillow is building production software without a single engineer.

It’s also disrupting entry-level positions and the schools that feed them. Postings for software development jobs are down more than 30% since 2020, though that’s also due to tech companies over-hiring during the pandemic and now cutting back. Not long ago, coding bootcamps were all the rage, promising to turn people with little computer science training into capable coders making good money. Today, that industry and premise are in flux.

Those who are versed in programming syntax and languages will still have a leg up. But such technical knowledge is no longer a gatekeeper. With some grasp of how to wield AI coding tools, creative entrepreneurs with interdisciplinary problem-solving skills and empathetic understanding of human development are poised to build the tools of tomorrow.

The data room

If you’re building solutions to move the needle on these figures, or in other areas across learning, health, and work, we’d love to hear from you!

Health

Food for thought: Just 62% of Americans say they are confident in the safety of their food supply, versus 70% in 2023. The dip is most pronounced among Millennials and Hispanics. Meanwhile, as exposure to nutrition content on social media grows, trust in content from government agencies has dropped significantly since 2022. Many more figures to chew on from the 2024 IFIC Food & Health Survey.

It pays to feel well: An estimate from McKinsey pegs the global “consumer wellness” market at $1.8 trillion, with Gen Z and Millennials spending more on health and wellness than their older peers.

Learning

Searching for school: More than 60% of U.S. parents searched for a different school to send their kids to last year. Younger parents, and Black and military families were among the most likely to consider new schools.

“Dismal” results from the latest nation’s report card from NAEP: U.S. fourth- and eighth-grade students’ reading and math scores were still significantly below those in 2019; reading slipped even lower than in 2022. The lone bright spot: Louisiana, the only state to surpass pre-pandemic reading levels.

Reports of college’s death may be at least a little exaggerated. Total postsecondary enrollment for fall 2024 was up 4.5% from the previous year, to about 19 million students. That’s above pre-pandemic levels.

Work

Quit quitting: The job hoppers are hopping a little less these days. According to U.S. Labor Department statistics, Americans quit 39.6 million jobs in 2024, down 11% from 2023 and 22% from the year before.

More hustling: Meanwhile, the share of U.S. workers with more than one job reached 5.3% in late 2024, the highest since 2019.

Get a life… coach: According to the International Coaching Federation, the number of life coaches jumped 54% from 2019 to 2022. The U.S. market reached $1.5 billion in 2023 and is expected to grow nearly 5% each year through 2030.

92 million jobs are projected to disappear by 2030, but 170 million new jobs will be created over the same period, largely driven by new technologies and the energy transition. These figures come from the World Economic Forum’s 2025 Future of Jobs Report, which surveys over 1,000 leading global employers.

Partner Perspectives

EdWeek Market Brief: Enzo Cavalie shares the keys to capturing the growing opportunities in the Latin American and Brazilian edtech market.

Edtech Insiders: Jomayra Herrera guest-hosted a recent podcast episode that discussed AI, TikTok, school staffing, and the implications of Trump’s proposed education policies.

On our investing radar for 2025: Steve Kupfer is on the lookout for AI agents that support non-instructional labor in schools. Caoimhe MacRunnels is looking at tools for underserved healthcare areas such as women’s health and aging care. Follow us on LinkedIn for other videos in this series.