NEW YORK – March 10, 2022 – VSS Capital Partners (“VSS”), a private investment firm investing in the healthcare, business services, and education industries, today announced that its portfolio company, Really Great Reading, a provider of high-quality, foundational literacy curriculum for students in primary grades, has completed the acquisition of InferCabulary (“the Company”), a provider of a web-based vocabulary program that helps K-12 students learn to think critically and build their vocabulary. Financial terms of the private transaction were not disclosed.
InferCabulary is an interactive, visual application that uses best practices in vocabulary instruction and introduces a unique method for teaching nuanced words. Focused on serving schools and school districts with its easy-to-use application for individual, small group, and classroom use, it helps students learn how to read, spell, pronounce, and know the meaning of thousands of words. With the addition of InferCabulary to Really Great Reading’s core offerings, the combined company will effectively accelerate its move into the vocabulary learning space.
“InferCabulary’s digital approach to furthering education aligns naturally with Really Great Reading’s mission of improving positive learning outcomes for schools, districts, educators, and students, and we believe it will be additive to Really Great Reading’s performance” said David Bainbridge, Managing Director at VSS. “It is one more example of VSS’s historic focus on investing in tech-enabled educational services and building value through strategic acquisitions and leveraging organic growth initiatives,” adds Bainbridge.
“We are delighted to welcome the InferCabulary team to Really Great Reading. Together, we have a shared commitment to improving students’ education and making an impact, and we believe this partnership will help us to achieve this objective more quickly,” said Scott DeSimone, Founder and CEO of Really Great Reading. “The acquisition of InferCabulary greatly complements and further strengthens our platform and expertise in the education sector.”
Research shows that the more students know about a word, the more easily they can map that word into their sight word memories for automatic retrieval, meaning there is tremendous power in students’ ability to decode and encode a word and in knowing what a word means.
VSS brings a long track record of investing in the education sector, with prior investments including: Cambium Learning Group (supplemental curriculum for grades K-12); VKidz Learning (elementary and home school curriculum); Infobase Learning (school and library reference databases); and Granada Learning (educational assessments), among others.
About VSS
Headquartered in New York, VSS is a private investment firm that invests in healthcare, business services and education companies. Since 1987, VSS has partnered with lower middle-market companies, working closely with management teams, to facilitate their next stage of growth. VSS provides capital for growth financings, recapitalizations, strategic acquisitions, and buyouts with the flexibility to invest control or non-control capital, based on the needs and objectives of each company. VSS has managed $4 billion in committed capital across 8 funds and has completed 93 platform investments and over 400 add-on acquisitions. For more information, please visit: www.vss.com.
About Really Great Reading
Really Great Reading is an educational content provider of foundational and supplemental literacy skills to primary grades with a focus on phonics and decoding. The company has a comprehensive suite of products that include instruction, assessment and professional development that help educators teach the foundational skills that lead to strong decoding and fluent reading. For more information, please visit: https://www.reallygreatreading.com/
About InferCabulary
InferCabulary is a web-based, visual vocabulary and reasoning program that helps students use critical thinking to learn the nuanced meanings of vocabulary broadly and deeply with a growing list of thousands of words. The tool can be used with individual students, small groups and the entire class. InferCabulary has won multiple awards and powerful independent research has been published. For more information, please visit: https://infercabulary.com/