companies

Amira Learning

AI reading coach that listens to K-3 students read aloud, scores fluency and comprehension in real time, and delivers personalized tutoring to build reading skills.

Amira Learning was founded in 2018 by Mark Angel and Pete Jungwirth, both former engineers at assessment company Renaissance Learning, building on more than two decades of reading-science research originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University. The company has raised more than $40 million from investors including Owl Ventures, the Amazon Alexa Fund, and the Google Assistant Fund, and merged with adaptive-learning company Istation in mid-2024 to form a combined K-12 AI education business. Mark Angel serves as CEO of the merged company. Amira's product uses speech recognition to listen to young students read text aloud, assessing fluency, accuracy, and comprehension in real time, then intervening with targeted phonics support or comprehension questions when a student stumbles. Independent studies, including a district-level analysis of over 15,000 Texas kindergarten and first-grade students, have found statistically significant gains in reading scores for students using Amira compared to matched peers. The company reports Amira is used in more than 250 school districts across 49 US states, with state education departments in places like Iowa purchasing licenses at scale.

Founded

2018

Headquarters

San Francisco, United States

Sector

applications