David Cumberbatch

Mr. Cumberbatch was most recently the President and CEO of ECS Learning Systems (ecslearn.com), where he raised over $10 million in debt and equity to acquire and modernize the assets of the two platform companies (ECS Learning Systems, Inc. and Prepworks, LLC) that constitute ECS Learning Systems today. He founded Asteria Education Inc. in March 2017 as a Texas C Corp to build a scaled education technology company with significant strategic value and exit potential within 7 years. Today ECS serves an estimated 600,000 students in multiple states with a strong market position in the state of Texas, and a proprietary, award-winning, computer-adaptive learning platform.

Mr. Cumberbatch is an Advising Partner at Apogee Equity Partners; a boutique private equity fund focused on the education technology and healthcare sectors. Mr. Cumberbatch is also a Senior Advisor to New Markets Ventures and a member of the board of advisors for Village Capital (an early-stage education technology incubator based in DC). He served as the Chief Strategy Officer and Executive Vice President at K 12 Inc. from 2014 to 2016. He also served as the Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer of ACT Inc. (the leader in college and career readiness assessment in the US) from 2011 to 2014. At ACT,  Mr. Cumberbatch was involved in the ACT test’s digitization efforts, the launch of ACT Aspire for 3rd to 9th-grade students, the development of ACT Profile, and the creation of the ACT corporate venturing department and investment in Pathbrite e-portfolio. Mr. Cumberbatch has held leadership positions with startups such as Imagitas and SimpleTuition. Before that, he played an instrumental role at Microsoft Corporation, where his business development work was featured in Fortune magazine. He also served as a Brand Manager of Procter Gamble in Europe and Latin America.

Mr. Cumberbatch earned a BA in Computing and Economics (Double Major, First Class) from the University of Kent at Canterbury and an MPhil in Management Studies from the University of Oxford, where he attended as a Rhodes Scholar.  He began his working life as an Assistant Teacher in his native Trinidad and Tobago’s public school system and remains passionate about the potential for technology to transform global education for underserved students and students of color. He resides in Iowa with his wife and two sons.