No matter one’s background or economic standing, access to quality education and the opportunities it unlocks should be universal. Such is the belief of Los Angeles-based edtech company Subject. Its platform offers a collection of video-based courses to high schools and districts across the nation. Launched in 2020, the company is going into its third school year.
Subject was designed to complement in-person education with flexible online courses. For instance, a school can partner with the edtech company to provide students with a course that the school doesn’t have a class for. Just as well, if a school needs to backfill the role of a particular teacher, Subject can provide students with relevant coursework in the meantime.
The platform is accredited by organizations including the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, University of California A-G, NCAA and College Board. This allows Subject to partner with schools and provide official credits for its courses.
Subject’s content targets predominantly Gen Z users — an audience that’s grown up alongside platforms like Instagram, Netflix and TikTok, and are considered to be “digital natives,” according to Subject co-founder and CEO Michael Vilardo. As such, Subject is looking to bring the best trends of consumer technology and social media into education to ensure school is as engaging and rigorous as possible.
The company got its start producing hour-long live video lectures focused on AP course support. Early on, Vilardo and his co-founder Felix Ruano discovered that modern users gravitate toward short-form content and prefer the flexibility to choose when they engage with it. Today, the platform supports 64 video-based courses across core, elective, AP subjects and more. Each course comprises 100 to 150 miniature lesson modules, with each module containing a five-minute video, comprehension quiz and homework assignment.
Subject is about empowering and unlocking any opportunity anywhere — we don’t want your ZIP code or your family’s socioeconomic status to dictate what subjects you can take.”
Subject’s courses are currently in session at more than 100 schools across the U.S.
“We’re really excited because we want to empower and partner with schools, and that’s why our whole focus from the beginning is how we help school leaders have the most success possible,” Vilardo said. “We found that we’re working alongside these districts to provide an opportunity to increase their course catalog by 20 to 30 percent.”
When a school partners with Subject, it allows students to take the platform’s courses whenever, wherever and however they’re able. The platform’s inherent flexibility allots plenty of time for after-school programs, extracurricular activities and the like.
“Subject is about empowering and unlocking any opportunity anywhere — we don’t want your ZIP code or your family’s socioeconomic status to dictate what subjects you can take,” Vilardo said. “And so with Subject, in partnering with [a] school, we can empower that school to allow every student to take any subject they want.”
The company was founded by a Latinx team that share similar coming-of-age stories. Vilardo comes from a Columbian family and grew up in the small-town city of Cary, Illinois. Over the course of five years, he attended seven different schools including public schools and community colleges. Later on, he became his town’s first Ivy League graduate with a degree from the University of Pennsylvania. Subject co-founder and president Ruano is the son of Mexican immigrants who grew up in the Los Angeles public school system. Down the line, Ruano attended Harvard University.
“Both Felix and I had a very shared experience at Penn and Harvard [in] that we felt like we were pretty drastically behind some of our peers on campus due to our high school experience,” Vilardo said. “We felt like that was something we really wanted to empower with building [a] product that could impact high schoolers across the country no matter what high school they end up going to.”
To date, Subject has raised more than $34 million in venture funding, including a seed round last spring and a Series A earlier this year. The co-founders were able to raise most of this capital due to the networks they built within their alma maters and other exclusive systems, according to Vilardo.
“We think the power of education is everything,” Vilardo said. “We’re so passionate about what we do here because education truly has the opportunity to shift generational status, and not a lot of industries can have that type of privilege to impact people at scale.
