Upchieve, an online tutoring app for low-income students, is launching a free tool for teachers

Upchieve, a free online tutoring and 24/7 tutoring app for low-income students, announced Thursday that it’s giving Title 1 and high school teachers a new tool to make sure their students get the support they need.

The new offering, called “Upchieve for Teachers,” allows teachers to provide 1:1 support to their students. They can invite students to sign up for tutoring, take classes, and monitor student forum usage. Previously, students had to sign up for tutoring services themselves, but with this new product, teachers can now recommend 1:1 tutoring to students for free. In the coming weeks, they will also be able to assign teaching sessions to all classes.

Upchieve for Teachers is available to teachers working in Title 1 middle schools and high schools. Title 1 is a federal aid program awarded to K-12 schools with high numbers of low-income families within school districts. About 43% of public schools qualify for Title I funding, with fewer than 50,000 schools benefiting from the program.

This new offering is expected to help Upchieve grow its user base by reaching students who may not be aware of free services like these or may not want additional help.

“The product will be very useful for teachers because it will help them accomplish some of the most difficult parts of their job,” founder Aly Murray told TechCrunch. “Students enter the classroom with different gaps in their foundation skills. Teachers should try to support all their students, but there is not enough time to support each student individually, so that is a natural place where a teacher can help. We are very excited to introduce a product that will give teachers more control.”

Upchieve was founded in 2016, shortly after Murray graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. As a low-income student herself, she struggled to get academic help throughout her education and wanted to make it easier for other students to be able to help whenever they needed it, even when she was doing homework at night.

“I was raised by a single mother, and since I had moved to the United States, she was often unable to help me with my homework and college applications. And so that had a big impact on my life. It made things very difficult, I found that I often needed help late at night when there was nowhere I could go to get support,” said Murray.

Upchieve says it has matched more than 190,000 tutoring applications from more than 20,000 students in all 50 states. Its 24/7 online tutoring sessions are conducted on in-app messenger or via voice chat on the web or mobile app. Upchieve covers more than 30 subjects, including math, science, English, history, humanities, and more.

Instructors can volunteer by registering on the website. Volunteers can be students themselves; however, they must be in the 9th grade or higher. Upchieve currently has approximately 2,400 active instructors on the platform.

“All Upchieve volunteers go through a background check, training, and certification process to become a volunteer teacher. Before they go to work with students, they must pass the quizzes in all the subjects they want to help students with,” explained Murray.

Similar to other edtech companies, the company uses OpenAI’s GPT-4o to assist instructors in providing AI-generated feedback and progress reports to students after sessions end. In the future, the company also plans to use AI to help instructors create practice problems and provide AI-generated summaries of student sessions through their Educator product.

“We have no plans to replace our teachers with AI anytime soon,” Murray added.

As a non-profit organization, Upchieve relies on donations, grants, and paid partnerships with schools, districts, and corporations. Sponsors include Atlassian, AT&T, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Guggenheim Capital, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Skyline Foundation, and Verizon.

Upchieve partners with more than 50 schools, and each school or organization pays a $10,000 annual partnership fee. The company also graduated from Y Combinator’s Winter batch 2021.

In 2023, Upchieve raised more than $4 million through philanthropy and earned revenue through paid partnerships. The company says its annual recurring revenue (ARR) is currently $840,000, which comes solely from paid partnerships.