Meet the Team

Graham Forman

Founder and Managing Director

Graham is the founder and managing director of Edovate Capital. He’s spent his career in education, entrepreneurship, and investing. The first phase of his career was in education policy where he worked for U.S. Senator Paul Simon and former California State Assemblyman, Senator, and Community College Chancellor Jack Scott. He worked with school leaders addressing some of their biggest challenges in leading large school systems.

The second phase of his career was as a startup operator serving as head of sales, marketing, business development, and customer success in impact-focused SaaS companies serving education. His last role included leading sales and business development for Netchemia. During his tenure the company grew to serve more than 2,400 school districts and 20,000 schools in the U.S. with a best-in-class talent management suite. Netchemia was acquired by People Admin (backed by Vista Equity Partners) in 2015, which kicked off Graham’s third career phase where he founded Edovate. In this role, he backs impact-focused seed stage K12 companies with investment and advisory support.

He lives in Denver with his wife and two children and enjoys travel, tennis, the outdoors, and cooking.

Ian Connell

Senior Advisor

Ian acts as a senior advisor to Edovate Capital, tapping his school-model innovation expertise and experience in scaling organizations. Outside of Edovate, Ian leads the innovative schools strategy at a national nonprofit, providing grant funding to support the launch of schools and school networks reimagining the K12 experience.

Prior to his time in venture philanthropy, Ian was an associate for Techstars and Kapor Capital. At Kapor Capital, he focused on the education sector and provided strategic support for a competency-based education startup, UniversityNow (acquired by National University System). Ian started his career as a cofounder of a California software company providing state and local workforce development programs with real-time reporting and analytics. Ian is also a founding board member of Moonshot edVentures, a nonprofit working to surface and support diverse leaders to design and launch the schools of tomorrow.

He received a BA in economics from the University of California, Irvine, and an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.