Matthew Ramirez CEO of WriteLab

Matthew Ramirez is the CEO of WriteLab, a venture-backed company that uses artificial intelligence to teach students how to write. The idea came to the former Ph.D. candidate at University of California, Berkeley's prestigious English program when he was teaching writing to oversized freshman classes. Born in McAllen, Tex., on the Mexican border, Ramirez grew up with mostly poor, non-native English speakers and attended the local community college for one year before graduating from the University of Texas at Austin. WriteLab now has $2.5 million in funding and has already been deployed in 53 schools, ranging from low-income high schools to Ivy League colleges.