Dreami

Dreami addresses the pressing issue of career readiness among US high school graduates, where 75% are unprepared for career decisions upon graduation. 80% of learners indicated that they would have been more engaged in their studies if they had the accountability and support from a career mentor.

This crisis is particularly acute for students in rural areas.

In rural America, 9.5 million students confront higher poverty rates, limited access to career counselors, and reduced social capital, creating formidable barriers to diverse career resources. Geographic isolation compounds these challenges, limiting access to social capital, educational opportunities, and career resources. Studies underscore the "invisibility" of rural students, exacerbated by constrained state and familial funding. Additionally, 18% of students are first-generation and low-income, 1 in 7 face poverty, and 34% represent marginalized communities.

Educator scale poses a significant concern, with high student-to-educator ratios constraining personalized career support. Alarmingly, 60% of rural students actively seek mentors, especially in STEM fields, but struggle to find them.

Numerous studies demonstrate the transformative impact of mentorship and career readiness programs, with a 92% enhancement in self-esteem, a 55% boost in career readiness, and a 52% improvement in school retention and homework completion rates. These programs correlate positively with graduation rates, post-secondary enrollment, and job retention. However, in rural communities, limited educator resources, funding, geographic isolation, and familial support impede students' access to tailored career readiness initiatives.

We’re now at a breaking point, where technology has to play its role in connecting our physically and mentally isolated youth. Dreami is on a mission to bridge the connection and career support gap for the learners who have limitless potential.

Dreami's software platform powers hyper-personalized career readiness programs tailored for rural students in the US. Leveraging innovative technology and soon AI, Dreami designs, launches, tracks, and scales personalized mentorship and career readiness programs. Students can easily sign up, complete personalized career matching quizzes, get matched with dedicated and vetted mentors, schedule sessions securely through Dreami, and monitor their progress. School administrators can oversee program success daily.

Dreami's vision is to revolutionize career readiness education by leveraging technology to provide equitable access to mentorship and resources for all students, irrespective of their location or socioeconomic background.

Implementation is relatively straightforward–our base software is already built to customize in minutes and requires simple adjustments to ensure accessibility. Once we’re able to implement those adjustments, we simply deploy the software in a matter of 1 day, provision student, mentor and administrative accounts and are able to launch the fully customized program within 2 weeks. 

Our software trains students and mentors on best practices of mentorship, conducts the matches, provides scheduling/goal tracking and resources tools, ensures safety and privacy controls are met, while offering educators and admins a daily dashboard with real-time impact metrics. 

Our theory of change is that by offering a technology powered hyper-personalized and accessible career readiness programs to rural students, Dreami can bridge the geographic and learning ability accessibility gap, social capital gap, career readiness gap all while scaling educators’ impact. 

Dreami serves 3 populations: students, career mentors and school administrators. 

The student population is our primary audience and at this time, we’re focusing on the 9.5 million rural students in the US who confront higher poverty rates, limited access to career counselors, and reduced social capital, creating formidable barriers to diverse career resources. 

Geographic isolation compounds these challenges, limiting access to social capital, educational opportunities, and career resources. Generally, 18% of these students are first-generation and low-income, 1 in 7 face poverty, and 34% represent marginalized communities. Currently we’re focused on serving rural high school students (grades 9-12), but have plans to impact middle school students in the next 1-3 years.

This is the power of technology–to bridge the gap between access and impact. Due to the immense physical isolation these students face, it is incredibly difficult to expand a learner’s view of career opportunities. But through our software, access to career discovery and readiness is equitable. 

Our solution reaches the most underserved population in the US, by allowing them to access the most personalized career readiness resources available at their fingertips. 

We know for a fact that our solution is life-changing: numerous studies demonstrate the transformative impact of mentorship and career readiness programs, with a 92% enhancement in self-esteem, a 55% boost in career readiness, and a 52% improvement in school retention and homework completion rates. These programs correlate positively with graduation rates, post-secondary enrollment, and job retention.

In fact, we’re starting to see these early results in our pilots!

Moreover, through our tech-enabled mentorship programs, students not only receive personalized career advice but also develop lasting connections with mentors and peers who share their interests and challenges. This transformative aspect of our solution goes beyond traditional career counseling, as mentors are trained to foster a sense of community among students, encouraging collaboration, mutual support, and the sharing of experiences. 

Our features and product experience that results in hyper-customizing the matching, goal setting, mentorship groups, personalized mentor training and simple, virtual and empowering user experience truly is a game-changer. Without our software, it would be nearly impossible to balance this level of customization while scaling to the degree of impact we’re aiming to do so (impact 1 million students in 5 years).

As a team entirely of engineers who have worked together for the last 2.5 years, our team’s ability to build quickly, prior entrepreneurial experience, deep empathy for our users, extensive network in Education and Nonprofits, resilience, and coachability will guarantee Dreami’s success. 

Composing an entirely BIPOC team, with 75% women, and being women-led and women-owned, we represent the voices of underserved communities. This diversity is not just a statistic but a driving force behind our mission to address barriers in education and provide equitable opportunities.

Below our team is:

Jasmine Snow, Founding Engineer:

As a second-time founder with a unique skill set in software engineering, UX design, and research, Jasmine is committed to creating products that deliver meaningful outcomes for users. Being a technical founder, she has a deep understanding of user experience design and research methods, which helps her create intuitive interfaces that are both engaging and effective for Dreami’s 12k users. Jasmine brings her high bar for innovation + design and rapid ability to learn (as proven by her pivot to software engineering), allowing our team to quickly side-step blind spots in the startup journey. 

Ashima Sharma, CEO:

Ashima brings her 9 years of engineering, product, leadership and strategy expertise to lead Dreami’s vision and growth. Ashima has led multi-million dollar capital projects as a high-potential engineer at Chevron, spearheaded global strategic initiatives at Cisco and was promoted 2x in 6 months to lead the Product Strategy team for a $1B product-line at Zendesk.  

Karthik Easwaran, COO

Karthik is co-founder and COO of Dreami. He is a Singaporean immigrant, military veteran and holds technical and business degrees from Stanford and Chicago Booth respectively. Karthik brings end-to-end Product excellence having led Conversational Commerce AI initiatives at Walmart’s incubation arm, driving data-driven go-to-market for Docusign’s premier e-Signature SaaS product and operationalizing $1M+ petroleum engineering projects at BP and Shell. Karthik’s leadership is critical in ensuring Dreami's engineering and operational processes are set up to scale 10x in the next year.

Dreami highly prioritizes co-creation with the youth on our platform. 

In the Design Execution process, we implemented a few co-creation tactics:

We’ve created an advisory board of youth who have been end users, advisors, experts and testers of every single feature we launch to youth.

 We run feature ideas sessions in focus groups, design reviews, usability testing sessions and continuous feedback tooling to gather, prioritize and improve the learner experience. 

We’ve partnered with the CLIP lab through our grant with the National Science Foundation and Digital Promise to have high school students test out prototypes and provide their feedback on several parameters

In the Improvement stage, we have collected thousands of data points from youth on their experiences with our product and improvements that can be made. 

We’ve received awards and funding from: The National Science Foundation, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Pivotal Ventures, Amazon, 757 Accelerate, DivInc, and others.

Dreami has achieved incredible success with adult learners over 2.5 years–we’ve impacted over 12,000 individuals through our technology. 

In January 2024, we have decided to expand our services and technology to impact K-12. So far, we’ve onboarded over 100 unique learners in 4 different pilots. We’re seeing exciting results in our early pilots with young learners. In an initial pilot with first generation students, we saw: 98% career goal competition rate, 97% program satisfaction rate, 92% positive mentor and mentee match satisfaction rating, with 92% of learners having never had mentors.

We are ensuring to take our time with expanding access as we do want to  make sure we are doing so in a collaborative way, while prioritizing co-creation with existing youth on our platform. 

By the end of 2024, we anticipate to onboard over 1,000 unique learners.

We've learned time and time again that together, we are limitless. That phrase goes for Dreami as a team as well. It is so critical to lean on founder, ecosystem and funder networks to achieve the scale of impact we're looking to make. As you can see, we've applied to MIT SOLVE 3 years in a row because we believe so strongly in how much the program can advance Dreami's vision. 

If we're going to impact 1,000,000 rural learners in the US by 2029, we need the best experts, support pillars, backers and team we can get. We believe the SOLVE opportunity will allow us to: establish strategic partnerships with educational institutions for further pilots domestically and provide R&D guidance as we refine our software and how AI will play a role in our roadmap.

We also know that we can contribute a massive amount to the other solutions and teams in the network as well. We have been able to leverage technology effectively and have experimented with sales and business models that can support the rollout of other ed-tech platforms as well. 

We're grateful for the opportunity and look forward to contributing to this incredible network of change-makers.

Our innovation spans across multiple channels: audience, distribution, and product.

In the realm of career readiness, the concept itself isn't novel; it's a standard outcome of K-12 education. Traditionally, this preparation has been facilitated by career or guidance counselors, yet scalability remains a challenge. Higher-funded schools can afford more counselors, providing personalized guidance to students. However, for rural schools grappling with limited educator resources and awareness of diverse career pathways, the ratio of one career counselor to 400 students leads to a lack of personalization, scalability, and accessibility.

Dreami's innovation lies in leveraging cloud technology, machine learning, and soon, generative AI to revolutionize career readiness resources. Our platform increases access, personalization, and relevance of these resources for every student, regardless of their background or geographic location.

Furthermore, our approach to distribution is equally innovative. While many edtech solutions target well-funded schools, Dreami focuses on rural and first-generation students. Rather than relying solely on school budgets, we collaborate with nonprofits, foundations, and corporations to fund and distribute our tool. This approach sidesteps the lengthy cycles often associated with edtech procurement, ensuring swift access to our solution where it's needed most. By prioritizing underserved communities and embracing cutting-edge technology, Dreami is reshaping the landscape of career readiness education.

Our theory of change is that by offering a technology powered hyper-personalized and accessible career readiness programs to rural students, Dreami can bridge the geographic and learning ability accessibility gap, social capital gap, career readiness gap all while scaling educators’ impact. 

Activities:

1. Platform Development: Dreami develops a user-friendly platform powered by cloud technology, machine learning, and soon, generative AI.

2. Partnership Building: We collaborate with nonprofits, foundations, and corporations to fund and distribute our platform to schools serving rural and first-generation students.

3. Mentorship Facilitation: Dreami facilitates meaningful mentorship connections between students and professionals in various career fields.

Outputs:

1. Accessible Resources: Students gain access to personalized career readiness resources, including mentorship, guidance, and learning materials.

2. Increased Engagement: Students actively engage with the platform, exploring career pathways, setting goals, and seeking guidance from mentors.

3. Expanded Awareness: Educators, parents, and students become more aware of diverse career opportunities and pathways available to them.

Immediate Outcomes:

1. Empowered Students: Students feel empowered to explore and pursue their career interests with confidence and clarity.

2. Improved Decision-Making: Students make informed decisions about their educational and career paths, leading to better outcomes post-graduation.

3. Enhanced Support: Students receive personalized support and guidance from mentors, helping them navigate challenges and overcome barriers.

Longer-Term Outcomes:

1. Increased Graduation Rates: Students are more likely to graduate from high school equipped with the skills and knowledge needed for success.

2. Higher Education and Career Success: Graduates are better prepared for higher education, vocational training, and career opportunities, leading to improved socioeconomic outcomes.

3. Community Impact: By investing in the future workforce, communities experience economic growth and prosperity, creating a positive ripple effect for generations to come.

Our theory of change is substantiated by a robust combination of primary research and external evidence from reputable sources. Through 90 interviews, 161 survey responses, 29 educator sessions, 47 prototype observations, and 48 product metrics, we've gathered firsthand insights into the needs and challenges of our target audience. Additionally, we've conducted 42 prototype observations specifically within our target market, refining our approach based on direct feedback. Furthermore, collaborations with industry leaders such as Big Brothers Big Sisters, Prevention Science, Journal of Educational Psychology, NAF, and MENTOR have provided valuable insights and validation for our strategies.

We are focused on impacting three distinct groups: students, career mentors, and school administrators. The impact on students will be multifaceted, tying into their graduation rates, career readiness, and long-term markers such as college enrollment rates and median salaries. 

As we shift from the Pilot to Growth phase, our primary objectives are to track student graduation rates and career readiness scores. Our data collection strategy for continuous improvement encompasses various facets. Firstly, we will gather Participant Profiles, including demographic details, educational backgrounds, and employment history, directly from participants during program registration. This data will facilitate the personalization of career readiness programs. 

Impact for the students at a high-level will be tied to: student graduation rates, career readiness and longitudinal markers including college enrollment rates and median salaries. 

In the first 12 months, our goal is to primarily track student graduation rates and student career readiness scores.

Outcome Data to Collect:

Student Graduation Rates: We will gather data on the percentage of students completing their education within the expected timeframe.

Career Readiness Scores: This involves assessing students' preparedness for entering the workforce through standardized tests or other established metrics.

Longitudinal Markers: We'll track long-term indicators such as college enrollment rates and median salaries of graduates.

Methodologies:

For Graduation Rates: Collaborating closely with schools and educational institutions to access official records and compare pre- and post-program graduation rates.

Career Readiness Scores: Utilizing standardized assessments or creating a program-specific evaluation system to measure students' skills and knowledge.

Longitudinal Tracking: Establishing a database to monitor alumni outcomes, including college enrollment and post-graduation employment data.

Progress Tracking will be a crucial aspect, with data on participants' quiz scores, completed modules, activity duration, mentor-mentee engagement, session cadence and recurrence, career goal progress, career assessments, match satisfaction, and long-term milestones all generated by our software, Dreami. Dreami provides a comprehensive platform for monitoring and assessing participant progress, ensuring scientific rigor in our evaluation process.

We’re seeing exciting results in our early pilots with young learners. In an initial pilot with first generation students, we saw: 98% career goal competition rate, 97% program satisfaction rate, 92% positive mentor and mentee match satisfaction rating, with 92% of learners having never had mentors. We’ve received anecdotal feedback including:

“I want to become the first graduate of my family, and begin the path to more opportunities for the future generations of my family tree. I also want to be in this program because I know it is a program that will help me along the difficult and unfamiliar struggles of college.”

“I have found that my accountability performance is higher when I have that commitment with another person to check in during the school year. I also want to be able to learn from someone that has navigated the...experience and can share the same experiences as going to school in the Midwest has not been filled with much representation from BIPOC and I want to change that.”

Dreami's core technology is a cloud-based web application that leverages machine learning and soon-to-be-implemented generative AI to provide hyper-personalized career readiness programs for students, particularly those in rural and underserved communities. Our platform serves as a comprehensive ecosystem where students can explore career pathways, connect with mentors, access learning resources, and track their progress towards their career goals. 

At the heart of Dreami's technology is its ability to analyze vast amounts of data to tailor the learning experience to each individual student's needs, preferences, and learning style. Machine learning algorithms process user interactions, feedback, and performance data to dynamically adjust content recommendations, mentor matches, and learning pathways, ensuring maximum relevance and effectiveness. We have existing API integrations in place today to integrate with approved tools such as Zoom, Google Workspace and others. 

In the near future, we are integrating generative AI into our platform to further enhance personalization and scalability. This innovative technology will enable Dreami to generate custom career readiness pathways, resources, and curriculums for each learner, taking into account their unique interests, strengths, and aspirations. 

Dreami's technology extends beyond the platform itself to encompass partnerships with community-based organizations, schools, and workforce development programs. Through API integrations and data sharing agreements, we seamlessly connect with existing educational ecosystems to expand access to our services and ensure alignment with broader educational goals and initiatives. 

Dreami's technology is not just about delivering content or facilitating connections; it's about empowering the most overlooked students with the knowledge, skills, and support they need to navigate their future careers confidently and successfully, driving positive change in communities and society at large.

Full time staff: 3

Part time staff: 6

Contractors: 2

Total: 11

We've been working on Dreami for 2.5 years, and on the K-12 focus for 6 months!

Dreami embodies equity at its core. Composing an entirely BIPOC team, with 80% women, and being women-led and women-owned, we represent the voices of overlooked communities. This diversity is not just a statistic but a driving force behind our mission to address systemic barriers in education and provide equitable opportunities for historically underserved communities. We employ hiring practices that are non-traditional for a tech startup: we don't screen for pedigree, FANG experience or 4 year degrees. 

We hire for potential and for staff who can pour empathy into our product. Our founding engineer pivoted her career from social impact to engineering through a bootcamp and is the first engineer in her family. She's a testament to how we create an equitable opportunities for our members. 

This extends to one of our key ways Dreami supports historically underserved communities is by partnering with nonprofits and organizations already working within these communities. We recognize that these organizations often have the trust and relationships needed to reach and support students who may otherwise be overlooked or underserved by traditional education systems. By collaborating with these partners, Dreami can ensure that our programs are reaching those who need them most and are aligned with the specific needs of each community.

Dreami is B2B--we sell 3 tiers of software plans and add-on services primarily to Nonprofits, Corporations and Workforce/Economic Development orgs.

While our primary end users are rural and first-generation students and career mentors, we realized that selling directly to K-12 will be a painful and long sales process to generate revenue and impact.

After many experiments, we've realized that Nonprofits, Corporations and Workforce/Economic Development orgs have the funding, ability and responsibility to purchase tools like Dreami to distribute and provide to K-12 schools. They all receive grants from Local and Federal opportunities to provide technical support and programming to K-12. 

This makes Dreami a much faster and easier sell, increasing our distribution.  

The 3 tiers of our software career readiness product we provide vary depending on # of users requiring access and level of customization required. These plans start at $5,000/year and can go up to $15,000/year. We also provide 1-time services including: consulting, program design and training.

Dreami, as a for-profit C Corp, has taken deliberate steps to ensure the sustainability of our solutions from day one. Recognizing the importance of diversified revenue streams, we've developed a robust B2B sales motion to sell our solutions and services to community-based organizations, schools, and workforce development programs.

To further strengthen our sustainability, we've built a recurring revenue stream through our software, coupled with a successful referral process that consistently brings in new leads. For the last 2.5 years, each month, Dreami is proud to add an average of 2 new partners, while maintaining an impressive 85% renewal rate with our existing partner base. This has resulted in revenue growth exceeding 200% last year alone. Dreami has brought in over $120,000 in revenue through this revenue stream. 

Dreami has now also launched our services business, to add additional revenue streams for partners who are hesitant to adopt edtech, and to diversify our sustainability. Lastly, Dreami will be leveraging corporate social responsibility budgets to have companies sponsor the cost of Dreami for our partners to add additional revenue. 

We've secured over $650,000 in over 10 grants from esteemed organizations such as The National Science Foundation, Pivotal Ventures, Techstars, DivInc, and Amazon. These grants not only provide vital financial support but also validate the impact and potential of Dreami's work. While we do not rely on these grants, it has helped to open up the doors for future partners and increase the visibility of Dreami. Our plan going forward is to also apply for the Federal, State and Local funds dedicated to career readiness programs including Pell Grants and Career Technical Education funds.