About Accord IEP

Who's building Accord.

The people building Accord.

Accord is built by three founders — two who've spent their careers inside education and the software that serves it, and one who's spent his building the businesses that carry good products to the people who need them.

Melissa Rajaram, PhD, CCC-SLP

Co-founder & Chief Product Officer.

melissa@accordiep.com

Melissa is a product leader who has spent her career building special-education software, leading product at Amplio across its speech-language and dyslexia intervention platforms. What makes her rare is the depth she brings to it — genuine clinical and scientific expertise in the very problems special-education software is built to solve. That depth is what lets her create solutions that meet the needs of real special education departments.

Brian Jawalka

Co-founder & Chief Executive Officer.

brian@accordiep.com

Brian saw the state of special-education software firsthand as CEO of Amplio, an education technology company serving more than 700 districts. He built and scaled that company from the operator's seat — district relationships, team building, and commercial execution. Before Amplio, his career spanned enterprise technology leadership and education-focused investing, evaluating dozens of companies across the sector.

Patrick Lee

Co-founder & Chief Revenue Officer.

patrick@accordiep.com

Patrick has spent two decades building the business side of technology companies — the work of turning a good product into a company that lasts and reaches the people it's meant for. He's built sales and customer teams from nothing, run entire business units, and led teams of hundreds across the globe. He's helped take companies public and through billion-dollar deals.

Two capabilities, both Texas-built.

Accord ships two capabilities today. Service-and-goal tracking gives providers a daily logging workflow and gives administrators a dashboard comparing what each student's IEP prescribed to what's been delivered. Funding determination makes it feasible for providers to classify every student under TEA's New Intensity of Services Funding Model and for districts to consolidate the determinations into one dataset ready for the state.

Built for Texas, intentionally.

Austin skyline at dusk, viewed across the Colorado River.

Texas has a special education staffing crisis that hits harder than most of the country — three-quarters of elementary and middle schools couldn't fill their SPED vacancies last year. On top of that, the state just rewrote how special education funding works, in a framework unique to Texas that takes effect for the 2026–27 school year. Every student in special education has to be classified into the new tier-and-service-group structure before the first day of school, and the average Texas district has multiple campuses and multiple case managers who'll need to do that work in parallel, on students they share. TEA's classification tool was built for a single user in a single session, and that isn't the shape of the work in front of a Texas SPED department.

We think Texas needs a tool built for what Texas SPED departments actually do.