Mara Steiu’s life as an education entrepreneur started early. During high school, she launched an edtech company focused on financial literacy. In her gap year before college, she founded an accelerator for high school students.
Now, with support from the Stanford Impact Founder Fellowship program, Steiu is building Journify Learning, an AI-powered platform that supports the K-12 special education ecosystem of teachers and providers who help students of all abilities — including those with disabilities and learning differences — to reach their full potential.
Her goal to expand access to quality education stems from Steiu’s experience growing up in Romania. With a mother and grandmother who were public school teachers — and as a public school student herself — Steiu recognized how resource scarcity affects student outcomes. “Given my family history, I’ve seen a lot of the challenges in public education,” she says. “And coming from a middle-class family in Romania, I understood how important it is for marginalized students to have access to high-quality education.”
Laying the Foundations for Impact
One of Steiu’s first forays into entrepreneurship was her tech accelerator, iXperiment, designed to help Romanian teenagers learn about finance and entrepreneurship. Though it was successful, she soon realized that she could reach more students by transforming outdated education systems for overlooked students by using technology more systematically as an innovation tool. “The accelerator was a community-based initiative, which is amazing,” she says. “But it’s easier to scale technology-based products than communities.”
Her next step was to develop the skills required to build solutions at scale, which meant immersing herself in three worlds: technology, business, and education.
After graduating from Babson College with a degree in business analytics and information technology on a full scholarship — and cross-registering at Wellesley College for classes in computer science — Steiu wanted to gain relevant professional experience. “My priority was to learn to build products at scale,” she says. “So I realized it would make sense to be a product manager.”
The years she spent in this role — working on B2B products for Microsoft and at Twitter with a B2C focus — paid off. “That [experience] taught me to be way more technical,” she says. “But also how to drive teams, because as a product manager, you have to work with data scientists, designers, marketing, finance people, and engineers. It’s a lot like being a founder but within a company.”
The Journey Forward
When she arrived at Stanford to pursue a dual MBA and MA in education, Steiu knew she wanted to build an edtech business. But she was still unsure exactly what that would look like. So she embarked on an extensive research process that involved hundreds of interviews with public school teachers, principals, superintendents, and other education experts to identify the challenges they faced.
Over the course of these conversations, she kept hearing the same thing: “Everyone was talking about special education,” she says. “That was a common theme across all the interviews with education stakeholders.”
Steiu learned that in the U.S., demand for special education professionals greatly outweighs supply. While one in five students have special education needs, over 70% of U.S. public schools report needing to hire special education teachers — making it the hardest position to staff.
Moreover, the field struggles to retain qualified teachers, with the highest churn rate of all teaching specializations. Between 2013 and 2023, enrollment of students with diverse needs rose by more than 16% (at a time when overall public school enrollment fell by 1%), leaving almost half of the nation’s schools understaffed in special education. In addition, special education teams are bogged down with paperwork as a result of heavy compliance demands, leaving them with less time to help students.
“Special education teachers love working with students, but they’re spending, on average, more than half their time on paperwork,” Steiu says. “That’s frustrating.”
The Power of the Algorithm
Assessing the various needs facing special education stakeholders, it became clear to Steiu that artificial intelligence could provide a solution.
“These problems are suited for AI, because AI can be used to maximize productivity by automating compliance paperwork. And it drives student outcomes because you can personalize instruction for students with special needs and align instruction with evidence-based practices,” such as High-Leverage Practices and Universal Design for Learning, she says.
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We want to become the de facto player in special education.
This realization formed the basis of Journify Learning, an AI assistant that automates progress tracking and data integration among support providers, allowing special education teaching and support teams to reclaim time from compliance paperwork and instead focus on delivering quality learning to their students.
The platform is also positioned to improve learning outcomes by helping teachers develop personalized, evidence-based materials that align with each student’s Individualized Education Program, or IEP. A real-time dashboard allows everyone to see how students are performing and identifies potential barriers to be addressed — while maintaining extremely robust levels of data privacy and security.
Co-founded with Sagar Manchanda, a software engineer Steiu met while working at Microsoft, Journify Learning has already been adopted by schools and districts in more than eight states and has supported thousands of students. In 2025, the company won the world’s largest edtech competition, the Tools Competition, and was certified by Digital Promise as a Responsibly Designed AI Product. Journify was also the only special education company invited to the White House’s Task Force on AI Education, committing to scaling AI literacy resources for education teams across the country.
Learning While Doing
The fact that Steiu was able to do the foundational research for Journify while she was at Stanford GSB played an important part in helping her launch the enterprise. At Stanford, she took advantage of many classes and opportunities that prepared her to build a business.
“Lean Launchpad was an amazing resource,” she says of the real-world, hands-on course that helps students understand what it is like to start a company. “In the spring, they have a course with an education focus. That was huge for us. We ended up building a small minimum viable product to get to know the market.”
Meanwhile, through Stanford’s eight-week Impact Design Immersion Fellowship at Stanford GSB’s Center for Social Innovation, she received a stipend to cover logistical expenses and peer support as she identified potential customers and tested her ideas.
Now, thanks to her Stanford Impact Founder Fellowship, she has funding as well as the leadership development and personalized entrepreneurship coaching that will help her build Journify into a successful business that can change lives.
Of course, learning is an ongoing process. And Steiu is constantly re-evaluating and tweaking the Journify model as she gains an ever-deeper understanding of the special education landscape.
But the principles that underpin her work remain constant, she says, and differentiate Journify from other solutions: the use of AI to drive new efficiencies, create what Steiu calls an “infrastructure of collaboration,” and empower educators to improve academic and lifetime outcomes.
Steiu has big ambitions for the business. “We want to become the de facto player in special education,” she says. However, this business objective underpins her broader mission of helping students achieve economic security by raising their chances of successful graduation.
“There’s a huge discrepancy in graduation rates between students in special education and those who receive a general education,” she says. “Graduation is central to whether you get a job or not and what you can do in life. And everything we do is intended to drive students toward their goals.”