Actor LeVar Burton is raising money for his “Reading Rainbow” business venture at warp speeds.
In just two days, the former “Star Trek: The Next Generation” star has more than doubled his goal to raise $1 million to expand his educational start-up, which owns the famous “Reading Rainbow” brand.
Burton, who was the face of the beloved PBS show until it went off the air in 2009, posted his $1 million fund-raising project on crowd-funding website Kickstarter on Wednesday.
The numbers were going up and we kept hitting refresh, saying: This can’t be right.
- Mark Wolfe, co-founder and CEO of Reading Rainbow
By Wednesday night, Burton had raised more than $1 million. By Thursday night, he had raised close to $2.2 million.
“We were shocked. Totally shocked,” said Mark Wolfe, co-founder and CEO of Reading Rainbow, which currently makes a reading app for kids. “The numbers were going up and we kept hitting refresh, saying: This can’t be right.”
Burton and Wolfe started the company in 2011 after they bought the rights to Reading Rainbow. With some funding from Raymonds Capital, a private investment company in Warren, NJ, they launched an interactive reading app for tablets, which has since become the top-selling educational app for tablets.
The Kickstarter campaign will fund their next phase of growth: interactive reading websites for homes and schools.
The tablet app is free to download but costs $5 a month for unlimited book downloads. The website for homes will cost the same, Wolfe said.
Schools will pay a licensing fee that has yet to be determined, he said.
The company will also give out licenses to the site and its book downloads to schools in “need,” Wolfe added.
The goal was to give out licenses to 1,500 “in-need” schools, Wolfe said. The extra cash will allow the company to expand the number of schools that get the product free, he said.
The company, which started with three employees and has grown to close to 20, also plans to hire more staff, Wolfe said.