The accreditation crisis: A silent drain on school resources

The global K-12 education sector is under immense pressure to demonstrate quality and drive continuous improvement. Yet, the very process designed to ensure standards—accreditation—has become a significant operational burden. Today, schools lose an estimated 35% of their staff working hours to accreditation paperwork alone. For a single two-year cycle, this translates into a staggering 60,000+ staff hours and over 150 meetings, all spent manually managing upwards of 10,000 evidence files across 4 to 8 overlapping regulatory frameworks.

This turns quality assurance into a costly, episodic compliance exercise rather than a driver of meaningful, sustainable improvement. Existing portals and tools stop at document storage, leaving school leaders to manually map evidence, identify gaps, and draft reports. The result is a system that is slow, inefficient, and fails to deliver actionable insights from the vast amount of data it generates. This is the critical challenge Novana is built to solve.

Across Asia-Pacific, approximately 30,000 K–12 schools — public and private — participate in formal accreditation, inspection, and quality assurance processes. Each spends an average of ~$150K annually on accreditation, internal review, improvement planning, and external consultancy — a $4.5B annual market still run on manual, fragmented workflows.

Novana: AI-native accreditation for continuous improvement

Novana is an AI-powered accreditation and school quality improvement SaaS built specifically for K-12 schools. It is the operating system for school quality, transforming the high-stakes accreditation process from a manual compliance burden into a continuous, data-driven engine for improvement.

The platform automates evidence mapping across multiple international frameworks—including WASC, IB, CIS, Cognia, and COBIS—and turns thousands of disparate evidence files into a structured, real-time dashboard of insights. 

Novana’s MVP is already live and embedded in real accreditation workflows at eight international schools across Japan, Thailand, and Vietnam. These early partners are using the platform to centralize evidence, enable professional reflection among leadership teams, and maintain a state of continuous readiness, effectively ending the cycle of high-pressure, last-minute preparation.

Led by a team combining deep domain expertise with mission-critical engineering

Solving a problem deeply embedded in the education system requires a team that combines first-hand understanding of school operations with world-class, AI-native product execution. Novana is led by a team that embodies this synthesis.

Connie Kang (Co-Founder and CEO) brings 11 years of experience in international education, with over six of those years focused directly on managing international accreditation. Holding two Master’s degrees from The Education University of Hong Kong and diplomas in IB and Cambridge international leadership, Connie has lived the problem she is solving. Her deep domain expertise gives Novana instant credibility and an unparalleled understanding of user needs.

Itay Lisey (Co-Founder and CTO) is a software engineer with a proven track record of building and scaling production-grade systems, including at a Y Combinator-backed company. His experience as a team leader for a civilian protection software engineering team brings critical expertise in building secure, reliable, and mission-critical platforms—essential for handling sensitive school data and high-stakes workflows.

Our investment thesis

Our investment in Novana is a conviction-driven bet on a category-defining platform. The education sector is at a clear inflection point, driven by three converging trends:

1. AI Maturity in K-12: With the AI in Education market growing at ~38% CAGR, AI has become robust enough for high-stakes workflows like accreditation.
2. Demand for Measurable Quality: Over 80% of the public expects schools to be benchmarked, yet few have the tools to do so effectively.
3. The Accreditation System Gap: The K12 accreditation workflow currently lacks a comprehensive AI integration, presenting a significant market opportunity.

We are incredibly excited to back Connie and Itay as they build the essential infrastructure for school quality in the AI era. Their immediate goals are to secure more active school clients and convert early pilots to predictable revenue. They are also planning to launch a seed round in mid-2026 to accelerate their expansion across APAC, creating a more transparent, sustainable, and human-centered education system for all.

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To find out more about Novana, visit their website here.

Interested in building the next category-defining solution? Learn more and apply for the Antler Japan Residency Program here.