We are thrilled to announce the winners of the 2026 Launch Startup Competition, presented by Walton Family Foundation. This year’s Launch Award winner is Apprentos. Taking home the Impact Award is ShareTheBoard. Rézme stole the hearts of our community with the most votes, winning the Community Choice Award.
Launch Award Winner
New York, NY
America’s future talent isn’t coming from college; it’s coming from apprenticeships. Apprentos is the Operating System making that possible. We replaced a pre-internet bureaucracy with a modern stack: employers launch programs in minutes, governments track live ROI, and talent gets mobile-first career guidance. In our pilot, we slash administrative costs from $400K to $1.3K per apprentice. We aren't just building workforce tech. We are rewriting the code for the American Dream.
Impact Award Winner
Kraków, Poland
ShareTheBoard is a software solution that radically improves the accessibility of board-based classrooms. It effectively gives analog surfaces digital capabilities: everything written by hand is zoomable and unobstructed, captured in real time, and even auto-transcribed. Using schools’ existing hardware, ShareTheBoard provides an affordable and easily implementable solution to guarantee equitable board access for students with learning differences, visual impairment, or mobility issues.
Community Choice Award Winner
Palo Alto, CA
Rézme helps employers and colleges recruit hidden talent, including veterans, justice-impacted individuals, and opportunity youth. We integrate skills-based screening, partner referrals, government incentive capture, and fair-chance hiring compliance directly into HR systems. Candidates receive legal-education to understand their employment rights while employers gain a compliant recruiting process that reduces risk, increases candidate yield, and automates government incentives for higher ROI.
The Launch Startup Competition highlights innovative startups across the education and edtech space and gives them the platform to scale their goals. Out of the largest application pool in the competition’s history, these seven early-stage startups were selected to compete as finalists:
- Apprentos (New York, NY)
- Learnology (Brush Prairie, WA)
- Opal for Schools (New York, NY)
- Rézme (Palo Alto, CA)
- ShareTheBoard (Kraków, Poland)
- Storytime AI (Baltimore, MD)
- Youth for STEM Equity (Columbus, OH)
The competition was emceed by Adeel Khan, founder and CEO of MagicSchool AI. Following the live pitches, judges Kavitta Ghai, Nectir CEO and co-founder; Shayla Cornick, deputy director of edtech R&D at Digital Promise; Kevin Johnstun, Program Officer for the Education Program at the Walton Family Foundation; and Tina Austin, UCLA professor selected the three award winners. To help them prepare for the live competition, finalists and semifinalists had access to coaching provided by StartEd.
Congrats to Apprentos, ShareTheBoard, and Rézme!
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Photo by Adam Kissick
