Bernardita Sanchez Vieyra | Co-Founder, Edbinder

Bernardita Sanchez Vieyra did not come up with this business in a corporate meeting room, but rather in a school.

I am a trained educator, having the experience of working in two very different environments. I used to teach Spanish in New York City and, most recently, worked as an education coordinator in New Jersey, but prior to all this, I was an educator in Chile.

There was a significant difference between what I experienced as an educator in the two countries: the U.S. respects education, and teachers have resources, structure, and opportunities to advance, but in Latin America, many educators work long hours and are compensated minimally. They work hard and are well-educated, but there are barriers to professional advancement for educators.

This disparity in the treatment of educators remained with me over the years and was ultimately too significant to ignore.

In 2021, while I was on a personal visit to the Dominican Republic, Ismael Villanueva (the architect and now CEO of our company) and I made the decision to take action rather than continue talking about the problem. Wouldn't it be great to connect well-educated and qualified Latin American school teachers with schools in the U.S. that struggle to find and keep teachers for their classrooms?

We began with a small grassroot effort, which included: 

1. an online community 

2. hosting our first webinar and 

3. conducting limited one-on-one consultations.

Our journey began with a success story – an educator from Chile found a position at a school in New York City, which demonstrated that the capacity, urgency, and need to support teachers globally were indeed validated.

We approached our journey with a combination of bootstrapping, building, validating, and gaining trust in a sector whose decisions impact families, visas and futures. During a time when global investments in the education technology space have slowed, we closed a $500,000 pre-seed extension round led by HLR Group simply based on the fact that there was validation of data, demand, and outcomes.

Since the seed idea for Edbinder came to fruition in 2015, the company has grown from an initial position to where it is now in the following ways: construction of a community of 30,000+ teachers, publication of 400+ job openings in the U.S. with 150+ teachers placed in 8 states, and piloting programs in the UK, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand.

Recently, we have received funding to move to the United States to continue to grow and develop from the heart of the market while scaling and building AI tools. One such tool is Gabriela, our digital recruiter that assesses teachers for skill, match, culture, and potential for a long-term career in education.

Edbinder is much more than a platform – it is a belief that the life of a teacher can be transformed.

– As narrated by Bernardita Sanchez Vieyra, penned by the Rolling Authors® Team. Visit us at www.rollingauthors.com.