Ello revolutionizes the way children learn to read by combining real books with artificial intelligence technology and, in so doing, gives each child their own expert teacher. Ello uses evidence-based reading instruction to help them when they get stuck and behavioral psychology to motivate them to keep going. The company believes books are the portal to lifelong learning, and when children make a personal connection with a real book their natural, joyful curiosity flourishes.
Founders
Hiring Pitch
At Ello, our mission is to maximize the potential of all children. Our first product (Read with Ello) is an AI reading teacher that listens to a child read from real books. It uses evidence-based reading instruction to help them when they get stuck and behavioral psychology to motivate them to keep going. We’re now building on the success of Read with Ello and putting together the pieces of the world’s first complete AI teacher for children.
We’re a highly technical team building delightful learner-centered experiences which leverage the massive recent advances in AI. Our products put children on a path of lifelong learning, creating the foundation for their future and ours. Together, we believe we can close literacy and educational gaps around the world. We are backed by world-class investors, just closed a Series A, and we’re ready to bring on new talent to help achieve our vision.
Our team has deep expertise in artificial intelligence, K-12 education, and child development across institutions such as Stanford, Berkeley, Google, Apple, and more. We were part of Y Combinator’s W20 batch and have recently closed a funding round; previously announced investors include leading US and European VCs including Project A Ventures, Reach Capital, Khosla Ventures, Homebrew, WndrCo, Human Capital and K9 Ventures.
We’re a small, collaborative team that takes each other’s voices very seriously. Because our mission is to support all children, it is critical that our team is representative of the wider community; we place significant emphasis on ensuring diversity in our team and inclusion in our culture. We want to create an environment in which we can all be our best selves, use our strengths to take Ello forward, and develop our own skills. We want to have fun while working hard to do impactful things that we’re proud of – we believe it’s possible to do both.
Tech Stack
Our stack spans across various technologies, from custom-built in-house real-time ML models, to our consumer-facing mobile app, to internal infrastructure and tools. An overview of the different parts of our tech stack:
- Custom built child speech recognition model for real-time inference, written in C++
- Python libraries for ML prototyping and training (Pytorch, TensorFlow, sklearn, etc.)
- Infrastructure running continuous model training & fine tuning on GCP/AWS
- Applied state-of-the-art AI foundation models for adaptive applications & generative content
Mobile App
- Ello mobile app built using Unity (running on iOS/Android/Kindle).
- Custom bridging interface connecting Unity app front-end with on-device child speech model & service (ObjC/Swift on iOS and Java/Kotlin on Android)
Web Frontend
- Customer-facing and internal web portals written in React
Backend
- NestJS backend using MongoDB
- GraphQL API served over Apollo
Open Positions at Ello (3 Jobs)
3 open · 7 filled
