Today we’d like to introduce you to Maxeme Tuchman.
Maxeme, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I was born and raised in Miami, and even though I’ve lived all over the US at one point or another, Miami is always calling me home. So, after amazing opportunities outside of Miami with Mayor Bloomberg, the Gates Foundation and Chancellor Michelle Rhee and getting an MBA and MPP, I came back home to run Teach For America’s Miami office. With a once-in-a-lifetime chance to work for President Obama, I headed to DC for a year to focus on financial inclusion and student loans at the Treasury Department as a White House Fellow. As my fellowship came to a close, I yearned to come back to Miami and make an impact. While working with our TFA teachers, I had seen EdTech’s potential to reach students where they are and personalize education. I looked for the opportunity to join a startup that was changing the world in the early childhood literacy space. Luckily, Caribu found me and my co-founder just happened to be living in Miami. In the past 1.5 years together, we’ve invested as much in the Miami ecosystem as they’ve invested in us. I’m so honored to be building and growing our company in my hometown.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
If it’s a smooth road, it’s not worth traveling. I believe you only truly learn by making mistakes, stumbling, and having your experiments turn out differently than you expected (I don’t see those as failures). I’ve also only gotten stronger from all of the people that underestimated me. We had as much against us as we did going for us by being a female-founded education company based in Miami. For everyone that found one of those things as a drawback, someone else found it to be a benefit. We never stopped hitting the pavement and beating our drum. I’m not shy about telling people how I think Caribu is the next big thing.
Please tell us about Caribu.
Caribu is an education platform that helps parents, grandparents, and mentors to read and draw with children through an interactive video call when they’re not in the same location. We have hundreds of books, in six languages, and educational workbooks you can draw on together in real-time. We have a subscription-based model and donate free subscriptions to currently serving military through our partnership with Blue Star Families. We were named one of the top ten edtech companies to watch in Forbes and were featured in an Apple Keynote and iPad campaign. In the last 12 months, we were featured in an episode of The Pitch, got accepted into the AT&T Aspire Accelerator, won the 1776 global pitch competition, raised a $1.3M seed round and received $50K from Toyota to continue our work in early childhood literacy. Their tagline is “Let’s Go Places” and we were featured in a Toyota commercial to show that only with a strong foundation in early childhood literacy can you truly Go Places. We’re excited about our accolades, but we’re most proud when we get the customer emails from moms, grandmas and deployed parents that tell us how Caribu has improved their relationships with their toddlers and created a new love for reading.
If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
I wouldn’t change much actually. The last 1.5 years have been the wildest, most exciting, and surprising ride of my life. I’m grateful for every high, and every low and I don’t think I would change much if I started over.
Pricing:
- Free to download and try
- $6.99/ month subscription for unlimited access to the library and shared screen video-calls
Contact Info:
- Website: www.caribu.com
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/caribu/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Caribu/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/caribu
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