Founder of the Month is celebrating 15 years of the NYU Innovation Venture Fund this year, spotlighting founders from companies the Fund has invested in. This month: Kinvolved, founded by Alexandra Meis and Miriam Altman.
Before Kinvolved existed, Alexandra Meis (Wagner ‘13) and Miriam Altman (Wagner ‘13) were two policy graduate students who kept running into the same wall from different directions.
Alex had come to NYU by way of AmeriCorps, where she'd spent several years working in a South Bronx hospital alongside a pediatric neurologist, coordinating grants, educational programs, and support groups for families of children on the autism spectrum. It was there she saw up close how much a single family member, usually a parent, shaped a child's outcomes, and how much harder that job became when families were also navigating poverty, housing instability, or a language barrier. Miriam, meanwhile, was in the classroom as a teacher, watching the same dynamic play out from the other side: kids not showing up, and no good system for closing the loop with home.
They met at Wagner, swapped stories, and landed on the same question: what if there were a better way to keep schools and families connected, initially in service of solving the foundational problem of student absenteeism?
"I saw firsthand that parents wanted to be involved, but existing tools were broken," Miriam said. "Just texting translated updates from my personal phone showed me the power of simple connection — it cut absenteeism and changed the course of my students' lives."
A problem first, a company second
That question became Kinvolved's entire founding logic. Rather than starting with a product idea, Alex and Miriam started with the problem, chronic absenteeism. One in four students are considered chronically absent in the U.S., kids missing 10% or more of the school year. From there, they built what became Kinvolved: an app that let teachers track attendance, view data to inform targeted, just-in-time intervention, and automatically notify parents, in English or Spanish, when a student wasn't in school.
The first version was intentionally simple. But once it was in teachers' hands, Alex and Miriam noticed something in the data: parents were writing back. What started as a one-way alert system became a two-way conversation between school and home — a shift that came directly from watching how real users actually used the product, not from a roadmap.
"We must be speaking with the customer," Alex said, reflecting on that period. "They are the ones guiding us on this journey. If we're not, we're really not building the right solution."
That kind of customer-first thinking is baked into the design of the Leslie eLab's Summer Launchpad itself, requiring founders to speak with 100 potential customers before building anything further. For Alex and Miriam, that meant conversations with teachers, principals, community organization leaders, and parents across New York City. They were part of the program's first cohort, at a time when the Leslie Entrepreneurial Institute looked very different— smaller, scrappier, built around Frank Rimalovski and a handful of faculty who believed in the companies, but more importantly, in the founders and people behind them.
Persistence, pitched three times over
Kinvolved's path to funding from the NYU Innovation Venture Fund wasn't a straight line. Alex recalls pitching the Fund's board multiple times before securing an investment, each time returning with a direct answer to whatever gap had been flagged the time before: more customers, clearer validation, a stronger team story.
"I really can't express how positively influential Frank was at the time," Alex said. "Cautiously optimistic and positive with us, but also really pushed us — like, you really need to understand the market better. That coaching was incredibly impactful."
"The Innovation Venture Fund provided us with more than just capital — it gave us institutional credibility," Miriam added. "Their early backing was a stamp of approval that validated our vision, allowed us to hire key early talent, and extended our runway to take calculated risks we may not have otherwise taken."
It's advice she still passes on. A no isn't always a final no. Sometimes it's a question in disguise about product-market fit, traction, or team; the way forward is to ask which one it is, then go answer it.
Building something that outlasted the founding team's expectations
Kinvolved grew from that early prototype into a product used across New York City public schools, and eventually beyond. In February 2022, the company was acquired by PowerSchool, a moment Alex describes as validating yet bittersweet.
"It was exciting. It was definitely validating," she said. "But I don't think people tell you about the sense of loss that comes with it— I'm sure you hear that from other founders. It was formative and impressionable in shaping me as a leader."
Looking back, Alex is candid that the final milestone wasn’t the best part. The best part was everything that happened on the way there: late nights during the Summer Launchpad alongside a cohort of other founders who were also figuring it out as they went; flights to California for early investor meetings; and a specific afternoon in the basement of Bobst Library, whiteboarding names with Miriam before landing on "Kinvolved"—a name that eventually became its own verb among the teachers and principals who used it.
Still solving the same problem
Alex continues to work in K-12 education technology today, at ParentSquare as Vice President of Attendance Strategy — still, by her own description, working on the same underlying problem she and Miriam set out to solve at Wagner over a decade ago. She's also supported other founders coming out of NYU and in the education technology sector, drawing on the same network and mentorship that shaped Kinvolved's early years.
Her advice for students sitting on an idea today echoes the same principle that started Kinvolved in the first place: understand the problem deeply before you fall in love with a solution, and don't be afraid to ask for help figuring out what that solution should be.
"If you really believe in the problem, and there's a real market for what you're building, that's where I'd lean in," she said. "Take the no's with grace, and keep learning and staying curious. Don't take them as defeat."
"You don't need to fit a certain tech-founder mold to build something meaningful," Miriam said. "If you see a hair-on-fire problem, can validate it in the market, and know that nobody else is solving, you're already qualified. The 'startup' label is just logistics — your passion for the customer and end user is what actually matters."
Miriam is now Founding CEO and Managing Partner of Brass Ring Ventures, a seed fund and growth studio. She leads investing in AI-driven solutions for the future of work, bringing the same instinct that built Kinvolved to a new generation of founders. She also serves as Vice Chair of the Women's Fund Miami-Dade, continuing her focus on economic mobility for underrepresented communities.
