IXL Learning, the San Mateo, California education company, said on October 19, 2026 that it had acquired NoRedInk, a San Francisco startup whose online platform helps middle and high school students practise writing. The companies did not disclose the terms.
NoRedInk will keep operating as an independent brand, and IXL said teachers and students would see no disruption to the platform. IXL said it would put its resources and scale behind the product to add new features and bring it to more classrooms. Tucker Capital acted as NoRedInk's exclusive financial adviser.
The announcement did not say what role NoRedInk's founder and chief executive, Jeff Scheur, will play. A Business Journals headline on the deal said the chief executive would leave; the companies' own statement did not address it.
What NoRedInk built
NoRedInk is an English language arts platform that teaches writing through practice adjusted to each student. Exercises range from short writing prompts to scaffolded essays and guided reviews. Students restructure sentences, edit and mark up text and work with passages of several paragraphs, and the platform works students' favourite celebrities, fictional characters and historical figures into the material. Its most recent addition is Read-Write-Reason, a set of combined reading and writing activities.
For teachers, the platform offers exercises and diagnostics aligned with state and national standards, along with growth reports and gradebooks that track students' progress as they work. IXL's announcement said NoRedInk has been used by nine in ten US school districts since it launched.
When it raised money in 2021, TechCrunch reported that students had completed more than 10 billion exercises on the platform and that the company ran a freemium model with a paid premium tier for schools and districts.
“NoRedInk has built a product with a remarkably deep grasp of how to help teach one of life's most essential skills.”
The founder and the funding
Scheur started NoRedInk in 2012 while he was teaching English at a high school in Chicago, according to TechCrunch.
The company raised $6 million in early 2015 from True Ventures, Social+Capital Partnership, Kapor Capital and Rethink Education, K-12 Dive reported at the time. In August 2021 it raised a $50 million Series B led by Susquehanna Growth Equity, with True Ventures taking part; GSV, Rethink Education and Kapor Capital were also listed among its investors. Together the two reported rounds come to $56 million. The company did not disclose a valuation.
Why IXL is buying
IXL Learning began in 1998 and has grown into a group of education brands. Its brands now include IXL, Rosetta Stone, Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, SpanishDictionary.com, ingles.com, FrenchDictionary.com, MyTutor, Wyzant, Vocabulary.com, TPT, ABCya, Education.com, Carson Dellosa Education and Evan-Moor Educational Publishers. The Business Journals described the NoRedInk purchase as the latest in the company's streak of deals in recent years.
The purchase adds a writing product already in wide use in American schools. Paul Mishkin, IXL's chief executive, said NoRedInk had a deep understanding of how to teach writing and had won its place in classrooms through word of mouth from teachers.
Scheur said IXL shared NoRedInk's commitment to student-centred writing instruction. He added that as technology changes how people work and communicate, the ability to think critically and develop ideas matters more than ever.
Writing instruction in the AI era
The deal comes as schools rethink how writing is taught and graded now that students have easy access to AI tools that can produce essays. IXL's announcement framed NoRedInk's appeal around saving teachers time on grading and giving students structured practice with feedback, rather than around automated essay writing.
IXL's announcement opened with the problem NoRedInk set out to solve: middle and high school English teachers often name the piles of essays waiting to be graded as the most demanding part of the job, and teaching each student to write clearly takes time and individual feedback. NoRedInk's pitch has been that targeted practice and built-in feedback can take some of that load off teachers.
For schools that already pay for NoRedInk, the immediate change is the owner. IXL said the platform would continue as before, and the companies gave no timeline for linking it with IXL's other products.
