SynapticMash organizes, provides data for school districts

What: SynapticMash, Seattle

Who: Ramona Pierson, 47, founder and CEO

Mission: Offer school districts, through its LearnQube platform, a software environment for everything from curriculum management and virtual classrooms to grade books and attendance records.

Employees: 30

Financials: Pierson said the company is "nearly profitable."

Learning to communicate: Pierson began as a neuroscientist working with disabled patients. "I started doing some pro bono work assessing kids who had traumatic brain injuries," she said. "I became very interested in education."

Personal experience: In 1984, Pierson was hit by a car while running. She broke more than 100 bones and was in a coma for 18 months. She was blinded, but surgery enabled her to recover partial sight in one eye.

Seattle Source: A University of Washington grant brought Pierson to Seattle in 2005 and, later, the Seattle Public Schools asked her to develop The Source, an online resource that allows parents and students to view school news, grades attendance and other information.

Bringing it together: In 2007, Pierson took The Source a step further by founding SynapticMash. She said the district was spending millions trying to do data integration. "I realized that one of the things we needed to do was to give them [the district] a more sane way to pull data out of existing databases," she said.

Being proactive: The company also works to make the data actionable. "Instead of finding out that your kids are dropping out of school, we're able see the pattern before it happens and send the alerts to everybody who is supposed to have that information and actually collaborate around next steps," Pierson said.

— Patrick Marshall