Miriam Altman-Reyes On Investing In Start-Ups Driving Education And Economic Opportunity

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Miriam Altman-Reyes is the Founder, CEO, and General Partner of Brass Ring Ventures, an exited-operator-led fund investing in tech founders advancing economic mobility.

She is also a Managing Director at StartEd, a coach with the Transcend Network, and an advisor to private equity and investor groups in education and workforce innovation.

Previously, Miriam was Co-founder and CEO of Kinvolved, an efficacy-tested attendance platform acquired by PowerSchool in 2022. At PowerSchool, she served as Vice President of Go-to-Market Strategy and Partnerships, leading cross-functional efforts to launch K–12 and workforce solutions.

A former NYC public school teacher via Teach For America, Miriam has also been an NYU Adjunct Professor and fellow with Education Pioneers and Columbia University. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes 30 Under 30, and Crain’s. She holds degrees from Brown, Lehman College, and NYU Wagner, and serves on the boards of The Women’s Fund Miami-Dade and The Brown Club of Greater Miami.

Miriam discusses empowering underrepresented tech founders to scale impact-driven innovations, and key lessons from start-up leadership to help you unlock economic mobility and achieve both financial sustainability and measurable impact.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Indio Myles] - To start off, can you please share a bit about your background and what led you to working in education and workforce innovation?

[Miriam Altman-Reyes] - I started my career in New York City back in 2008. Fresh out of college, I participated in a program called Teach for America, which places recent college graduates (and others now) into classrooms that serve overlooked and underrepresented communities across the U.S. I taught at a New York City public high school for several years, where I had the opportunity to gain a firsthand look into some of the challenges facing our K-12 education system.

The issue that stood out to me most, because it was so foundational, was student absenteeism. I interrogated that challenge from the front lines as an educator and found that it was a twofold issue. Firstly, the data was difficult to access for the stakeholders who needed it to make informed interventions and ensure students were attending school. Secondly, stakeholders like parents, administrators, guardians, students themselves, and educators lacked the proper functionality and technology to collaborate and communicate effectively.

I left the classroom having identified a deep problem that I hadn’t yet solved, and as a student at NYU Wagner studying public policy, I launched my first company, Kinvolved, to address the chronic absenteeism crisis.

This issue is persistent and pervasive across the United States and it’s the number one indicator of whether a student will graduate from or drop out of high school, which has much broader economic implications across communities and the country.

At Kinvolved, I served as CEO and co-founder. Over about eight and a half years, we built a technology platform to address these challenges. Ultimately, the company was acquired by PowerSchool, which at the time was the largest publicly traded K-12 SaaS company in North America.

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I spent around a year and a half at PowerSchool, mostly focused on better understanding the broader education market after having spent so many years focused on a specific problem and solution.

I then leveraged my experience as an educator, entrepreneur, and corporate product leader to launch my second venture, Brass Ring Ventures. I’ve been fortunate to bring back together several members of my former Kinvolved team—many of whom have now been through more than one successful exit. While I’ve experienced the Kinvolved exit, collectively we've been through six in this space.

During my time at PowerSchool, I spoke with many founders and realised what set me apart was not readily available to many others, particularly underrepresented founders, including women and people of colour.

I had an amazing, hands-on board of investors who were founder-friendly and truly wanted to support me to be successful and ultimately lead my company to a positive acquisition. I wanted to replicate that experience for other founders by bringing our team back together to do it again.

As the founder of Brass Ring Ventures, can you share more about this organisation and how it's supporting tech founders to drive economic mobility?

I started Brass Ring Ventures with the operator model in mind. A lot of my success at Kinvolved came from having board members and advisors who had personally been through acquisitions and exits. They knew how to provide valuable tactical and strategic advice to me and my team.

They helped us remain focused on impact while also achieving our end game, which was the acquisition by PowerSchool. I realised many founders, especially underrepresented ones, didn’t have access to this kind of support. I wanted to replicate this.

We began by building what we call our growth studio, which is the vehicle we use to support founders, mostly from seed stage to Series A. Our model centres on a framework we refer to as advise, educate, and execute. I have a general partner in the fund who is also our operating partner, focused on finance and operations. We also have team members covering sales, marketing, branding, technology and product development, and U.S. market entry, especially for companies looking to expand into the U.S.

We take a very hands-on approach, leveraging the experience my team and I have gained through not just the Kinvolved exit but also several other acquisitions. We bring that collective expertise to founders who are in the early stages of building their businesses. I initially funded the growth studio with my own capital, as I believed this model filled a critical gap in what many other investors and funds offer.

About six months ago, we began fundraising for our first official fund. Prior to that, we had made some investments through partner capital, which went well, and we wanted to expand our ability to invest more.

Our goal is to drive more capital into businesses that are both strong impact opportunities and have the potential for successful exits, where we can return capital to our limited partners. This is a true win-win.

So far, the fundraise is going well, and we’ll start making investments from that fund later this year. We invest in companies generally led by at least one underrepresented founder, and about 92% of our current portfolio of 25 companies fits this demographic. These companies are primarily seed stage, and our focus is helping them cross the chasm to Series A, profitability, or acquisition.

We provide this hands-on support in four intersecting sectors: education, future of work, health, and financial innovation and inclusion. We see these areas as key drivers of the economic mobility and opportunity we aim to support through our work.

How do you identify and evaluate the solutions you support to ensure they can create long-term impact outcomes?

In terms of how we identify companies, a lot of it is relationship-based. We receive referrals from co-investors, founders we already know, and others within our network. Because we maintain such a hands-on relationship with entrepreneurs, both myself and my partners have built extensive networks in this space, which naturally leads to a steady flow of introductions.

That being said, we don’t want to rely solely on our networks. In the spirit of creating opportunity for everyone, particularly those who may be approaching entrepreneurship from less traditional pathways, we’ve made it easy for founders to apply and get on our radar through an inbound application process on our website.

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We respond to everyone who applies. We also actively engage through social media, have received some media coverage, and speak at many conferences, which all help us connect with new founders.

When it comes to evaluating companies, we look at a range of criteria. For earlier stage companies, one of the most critical things is founder-market fit. We want to back founders who have a deep personal connection to the problem they are solving. This connection usually leads to a deeper understanding of the issue and increases the likelihood that the solution will truly meet market needs.

Given the collaborative nature of our model, we also look for founders who are coachable and open to guidance and feedback. They don’t need to take all of our advice, but we hope some of it resonates with them and adds value.

We’re also looking for evidence of product-market fit. Although we work with early-stage companies, we typically don’t work with pre-revenue start-ups.

We prefer to see companies that have been in market for a few years, have customer traction, and have gone through at least one customer retention cycle. This helps us see whether customers are not just trying their product but continuing to use it and deriving real value.

We assess the overall market opportunity too, both in terms of the potential for impact and the financial viability of the product or solution. We really see these two aspects as interlinked.

Lastly, we look at both market traction and what we call “traction from the field.” Some of our companies come to us with previous fundraising experience, while others do not, but that combination of traction and promise is key to our evaluation process.

When it comes to the purpose-driven tech ecosystem, what key challenges or opportunities are you seeing, and how is Brass Ring Ventures addressing these?

There are many challenges and opportunities in building purpose-driven businesses, but from a more systemic perspective, there are a couple that stand out. One major challenge we’ve seen that we are actively working to solve is that many founders have developed strong solutions to address important societal problems, but without access to capital, networks, and the infrastructure needed to scale, those ideas often remain just that—ideas.

That’s a core area where we try to add value. We work hard to open up our networks to our portfolio companies, introduce them to co-investors, and engage with our strategic partners to unlock distribution opportunities.

It’s about really doing the work behind the scenes and not just talking about supporting these companies, but actually walking the walk to help them scale. This is where our operator-led model is particularly effective.

Another challenge we’re tackling is the need for clearer frameworks around accountability and impact. Many companies in this space are indeed driving impact, and they may be able to point to specific testimonials or case studies. However, what we want to help them implement are more systemic, scalable impact evaluation and reporting tools. Through our work in the growth studio, we support companies in building this capability.

From personal experience, I know that having robust impact metrics is not just beneficial for the communities these businesses serve; it’s also good for business. When companies can demonstrate measurable impact, it drives business growth, influences buyer decision-making, and ultimately strengthens the company's value proposition.

Helping our companies implement strong impact frameworks is a key part of the challenge we are solving.

How are you seeing the space of impact investing evolve, and what role can it play in addressing systemic issues like economic and social equity?

I think as more products enter the market and certain areas become more saturated, there’s growing urgency around finding solutions that truly work. Limited partners and consumers alike are demanding far more proof of outcomes and impact.

Impact reporting is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s now a requirement that drives buyer decision-making across the sectors we’re investing in. It’s critical founders understand how to measure their impact, report on it effectively, and hold themselves accountable. This isn’t just about values, it’s a best practice for driving sustainable business outcomes.

Beyond that, I believe the role of investors is evolving. Traditionally, investors have largely been viewed as capital allocators. But our model, which is operator-led, represents what I hope is the beginning of a broader shift in the impact investing space.

We’re seeing more investors who have also been operators, people who’ve built companies, led teams, and navigated exits. Bringing that experience and operational perspective to the table offers real, hands-on value to founders.

The stakes are higher now. The economic landscape has changed significantly compared to a few years ago, and founders need more support to drive results and deliver meaningful impact. We see our role not just as capital providers but as active partners in helping founders succeed.

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What advice would you offer to an emerging entrepreneur looking to raise capital for an impact-led venture?

I’d say three things. First, be extremely clear on your values and “why.” As an impact-driven entrepreneur, you have the unique opportunity not just to build something that makes money, but to create a business that also delivers meaningful social value. What gets you up every day? Why are you doing what you’re doing? Let that sense of purpose guide your venture and become a core part of your brand.

start building your community and network as early as possible. While we’d love for the process of building relationships with investors, strategic partners, and buyers to be fully democratic, the reality is it’s still very relationship-driven. Building relationships early is absolutely critical for success as an early-stage founder.

Lastly, think about growing in alignment with your capacity. It’s important to have ambitious goals and to build businesses with the potential to drive major impact and high growth, but traditional venture capital expectations don’t always align with the industries we invest in.

That’s why it’s so important to seek out not just patient capital, but intentional capital. This is capital that understands your mission and is aligned with the outcomes you want to achieve.

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently creating a positive change?

We currently support about 25 companies in our portfolio, and while I’m excited about all of them, there are a few that stand out and are worth highlighting.

One is a company called Miss Berni, which is launching a new platform called Edbinder. They’re addressing a two-part issue that sits at the intersection of education, workforce, and financial inclusion. The platform is designed to help solve the U.S. teacher acquisition and retention crisis by better connecting U.S.-based educators with the right professional opportunities.

At the same time, it provides access to opportunities for highly qualified, bilingual teachers in other countries, starting in Chile, where the team is based. They’re operating between Chile and the United States, and we’re really excited about the potential impact of what they’re building.

Another standout is OKO, a company based in New York and led by founder Matt Miller, who has spent a couple of decades working in the education sector.

He’s developed a platform to enhance collaboration in classroom settings, with the longer-term aim of adapting that same technology to workplace environments and other collaborative contexts. It’s a shift away from simply introducing more tech into schools and workplaces—it’s about ensuring the technology actually fosters meaningful collaboration.

Finally, Unruly Studios, based in Boston, has created a combined hardware and software platform designed to teach students coding and enhance their maths skills through a kinesthetic learning tool they call Splat.

What’s exciting is that it’s being used not just during the traditional school day, but also in out-of-school time settings, making it a highly versatile and inclusive educational tool. It’s been fascinating to support them and watch their growth.

To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend to our audience?

One of the books I always recommend is Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore. It’s especially relevant for entrepreneurs trying to move from early-stage validation to more scalable growth—it’s also where we get the language we use at Brass Ring Ventures to describe that journey.

Another book I’d recommend, particularly for those interested in the impact investing space, is A New Capitalism, written by my dad, Frank Altman. He’s had a long and meaningful career in this sector, so I have to give him a little shout out. There’s also a related podcast, which I think offers valuable insights.

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Speaking of podcasts, I’m a big fan of How I Built This by Guy Raz. It tells a wide variety of stories about entrepreneurs, and I find it really inspiring. I also regularly listen to The Interview and The Daily by The New York Times, which go deeper into different perspectives and provide helpful context on current events. I think this is important for anyone trying to understand how broader systems impact markets and communities.

Finally, I’d like to mention that we’re launching a community through Brass Ring Ventures later this summer. It will offer entrepreneurs the opportunity to connect with each other, engage with our team, and access exclusive resources and perks that we typically provide to our portfolio companies. It’s a resource I’m excited about and one I hope will be valuable to many.