14th – 15th OCTOBER 2025 | LONDON
Jay Kimmelman 2021 Speaker

CEO and Co-Founder
Bridge International Academies
Biography
Jay Kimmelman is CEO and Co-Founder of Bridge International Academies, the world’s leading cloud-powered learning service provider for students in emerging markets of Africa and Asia.
Bridge International Academies has delivered world-class education to 750,000 students across Africa and Asia + 1,500 of its own ultra-affordable, technology-enabled community schools and through government partnerships in public schools in emerging markets. Bridge has achieved outsized learning gains – 2x pass rates on national exams and 4x fluency rates on international assessments.
Mr. Kimmelman is a leader in the field of education innovation, previously founding and running Edusoft, the leading educational software company providing assessment platforms to 3 Million US public school children. After selling Edusoft, Jay and his co-founder Shannon May founded Bridge while living in a village in Liaoning, China to try to solve one of the world’s most pressing issues – how to provide a world class education to children from emerging economies whose families live on less that $2 per person per day.
Bridge has invested more than $100 Million in the development of its platform and business model, and is backed by the world’s leading venture investors, including LearnCapital, Khosla Ventures, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, IFC, and the Nigerian Sovereign Wealth Fund.
Mr. Kimmelman received his B.A. in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from Harvard University.
Jay speaking at the 2019 Education World Forum in London: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SH7-kymS1vk
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