Upchieve, a free app offering 24/7 college counseling and tutoring for low-income students, introduces a new tool to support teachers in Title 1 middle and high schools
The new service, “Upchieve for Teachers,” lets teachers help each student one-on-one. They can take classes, ask students to sign up for tutoring and monitor how students use the platform. Before this new product, students had to independently sign up for tutoring services. Now, teachers can suggest students for free one-on-one coaching. They can also set up tutoring lessons for whole classes in a few weeks.
Upchive for Teachers is open to middle and high school teachers who work in Title 1 schools. Title 1 is a government aid program that helps K–12 schools serve the areas with the most low-income families. Title I cash is available to about 43% of public schools, but only about 50,000 schools get it.
Upchieve hopes this new service will help it get more users by reaching out to students who might not know about free services like this or aren’t actively looking for extra help.
Founder Aly Murray told TechCrunch, “The product is going to be useful for teachers because it’s going to help them do some of the hardest parts of their job.” “Each student comes to class with different gaps in their basic skills.” Although teachers want to help all of their students, they don’t have time to do so individually. This is where a trainer can naturally step in and help. We are happy to release a product that will give teachers more power.
Murray started Upchieve in 2016, shortly after finishing at the University of Pennsylvania. She had a hard time getting academic support services when she was in school because she came from a low-income family. She wanted to make it easy for other students to get help whenever needed, even when they were working on homework late at night.
“A single mom raised me, and because she was new to the U.S., she couldn’t always help me with schoolwork and college applications.” That made a big difference in my life. Murray said things were tough, and I often needed help late at night when I couldn’t find anyone to turn to for help.
They say they have matched more than 190,000 tutoring requests from more than 20,000 kids in all 50 states. It has online tutoring lessons 24 hours a day, seven days a week, through the in-app messenger or voice chat on the web or mobile app. Upchieve has lessons in more than 30 topics, such as English, math, science, history, the humanities, and more.
Tutors who want to help out can sign up on the website. Volunteers can even be students, but they have to be at least in the ninth grade. At the moment, about 2,400 teachers are using Upchieve.
“To become a volunteer tutor on Upchieve, everyone has to go through a background check, training, and getting certified.” “They have to pass a quiz in every subject they want to help students with before they can work with a student,” Murray said.
Like many other tech companies, this one uses OpenAI’s GPT-4o to help tutors give students feedback and progress reports that AI created after the sessions. The company also wants to use AI to help teachers solve practice problems and offer summaries of student sessions made by AI through its Teachers product.
“We don’t have any plans to replace our human tutors with AI tutors soon,” Murray said.
Upchieve is a non-profit group that depends on grants, gifts, and paid partnerships with businesses, schools, and districts. Atlassian, AT&T, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Guggenheim Capital, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, the Skyline Foundation, and Verizon have given money.
More than 50 schools and organizations work with Upchieve. Each one pays a $10,000 partnership fee every year. The company also got out of Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 class.
For 2023, Upchieve raised more than $4 million through donations and paid partnerships. The business says its current annual recurring income (ARR) is $840,000, all from paid partnerships.