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The people behind 1EDU

The Founders

An architect and an educator, building for the schools that need it most.

Illustrated portrait of Justin Connor

Justin Connor

Founder & Architect

Justin has spent fifteen-plus years in platform engineering and enterprise transformation — Fortune-500 integrations and the unglamorous work of making large organizations' systems actually talk to each other. Master's work at Harvard, dual bachelor's degrees from UC Irvine, and a founder's habit of building the thing instead of recommending someone else build it.

At Blorp Blorp he builds enterprise AI and custom software on Foundations™ — grounded, scoped, auditable — and the mesh of products standing on top of it. 1EDU points that same architecture at the institutions that need it most and can afford it least.

He writes the platform. Every business object gets a versioned API covering its whole lifecycle before a screen ever consumes it, every action a school takes is written to an audit trail, and anything an assistant can do is something a person could have clicked — which is what makes an AI capability safe to hand a school in the first place.

The premise is that a forty-person school deserves the same architectural rigour as a Fortune 500: systems that expose their data instead of trapping it, an honest answer before any purchase, and a human hand on every send button.

Full bio →

Illustrated portrait of Kia Bell

Kia Bell

Co-Founder & Chief Growth Officer

Kia is an educator and Director of Operations at a growing academy, where she runs the daily reality of a real school — admissions, staff, families, and the thousand small operational decisions that never make it into a product spec. She's a Harvard Graduate School of Education degree candidate and a published children's author, so she thinks about learning from both ends: the systems that keep a school running and the child sitting inside them.

On 1EDU she is the ground truth. Every workflow, every screen, and every default gets checked against how a school actually works before it ships. If a feature makes sense to an engineer but not to a front-desk administrator on a Monday morning, Kia is the one who says so.

Growth here is not a funnel — it is one director talking to another about what their week is actually like. Kia leads that conversation, because she is having the same week.

kiabell.com →

Reach the team

support@1edu.app — replies come straight to us.
Or start where every school starts: tell us how yours runs.