Bellevue children's education venture raises $7.1 million

DreamBox Learning, a superstealthy Bellevue children's education startup, has raised $7.1 million from undisclosed angel investors.

Executives at the 15-person company won't say much about the product direction or target market, reserving those discussions for a company launch tentatively slated for February.

Its corporate tagline is "Where Kids Come to Learn" and a slogan on the Web site says the company "envision(s) a future where every student enjoys an individually tailored, world-class learning experience."

"That speaks volumes," said Lou Gray, who co-founded the company in February 2006 with former Microsoft executive Ben Slivka. He declined to elaborate on the meaning of those words.

Gray previously was president of Bellevue-based UIEvolution and worked as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Ignition Partners. Slivka spent 14 years at Microsoft and was best known for starting the Internet Explorer team in 1994. Gray declined to say how he and Slivka came up with the idea.

"We really still want to stay in stealth mode as much as possible," said Vice President of Marketing Sarah Daniels, who joined the startup earlier this year from Aventail. "We don't want to tell our story to the world."

Daniels declined to say if it will be focused specifically on online education, though a few Seattle-area companies -- including InfiLearn and LiveMocha -- have been launched in that arena in the past few months.