Bedford-based youth enrichment platform Unleashed Brands has made a strategic investment to acquire Maryland-based Sylvan Learning, a leading provider of supplemental and enrichment education for K-12 students that has more than 500 franchised locations.
Unleashed Brands said that it provides safe, fun, and enriching environments to help kids learn, play, and grow. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.
The acquisition of Sylvan Learning is the sixth strategic acquisition into the youth enrichment market for Unleashed Brands, further expanding its reach into the education segment, said Michael Browning, founder, and CEO of Unleashed Brands.
“The addition of Sylvan Learning aligns perfectly with Unleashed Brands’ goal to provide top-notch opportunities to help kids learn, play, and grow from birth until they [leave home] and go to college or the working world,” Browning said in a statement.
Building confidence, curiosity, and a love for learning
Unleashed Brands said that Sylvan Learning’s mission is to build academic confidence, ignite intellectual curiosity, and inspire a love for learning. It said the brand blends teaching with technology to get results and has helped millions of students and families achieve new levels of academic success in its 45 years in business.
The company said that Sylvan’s tutoring approach combines top-notch teachers with SylvanSync technology on digital tablets for an engaging learning experience and is also a one-stop solution for tutoring in all subject matters, college prep, STEM, and more.
“Unleashed Brands’ mission and goals for growth align perfectly with what we’re looking to achieve for Sylvan Learning,” Sylvan Learning CEO John McAuliffe said in a statement.
Noting Unleashed Brand’s past success in growing complementary portfolio brands, McAuliffe said he’s “confident we’ll be able to do the same, reaching even more students and allowing them to achieve their goals for a brighter future.”
McAuliffe said the tutoring company looks to leverage “Unleashed Brands’ strategic resources and technology infrastructure” to reach a sider audience.
Unleashed Brands said it will serve as the parent company of Sylvan Learning, as it does for its other brands including Class 101, XP League, Premier Martial Arts, Snapology, The Little Gym, and Urban Air Adventure Park.
Unleashed Brands has faced lawsuits from franchisees
Unleashed Brands has been in the news in the past year with reports of lawsuits from franchisees. According to the Dallas Morning News, owners charged that the company was “downplaying the work needed to run youth-oriented businesses, pushing inexperienced entrepreneurs into running multiple concepts and changing company terms.”
In a notable lawsuit, an arbitrator ultimately ruled in favor of Unleashed Brands.
Get on the list.
Dallas Innovates, every day.
Sign up to keep your eye on what’s new and next in Dallas-Fort Worth, every day.
R E A D N E X T
-
CYPHER Learning was founded by Graham Glass, a former senior lecturer at UT Dallas who grew frustrated at the amount of time it took to create courses and longed to spend more time teaching. CYPHER Copilot aims to change that by helping teachers create engaging, gamified courses and assessments more quickly.
-
7-Eleven is scouting for the next big thing in snacks, beverages, alcoholic drinks, and 'better-for-you' products. Emerging brands could see their products on the shelves of 7-Eleven, Speedway, and Stripes stores nationwide.
-
Dallas-based franchise growth-focused platform Unleashed Brands is expanding its leadership by hiring Diane Sanford as chief people officer. Among the platform's brands are Urban Air Adventure Park, Snapology, The Little Gym, XP League, Class 101, and Premier Martial Arts. Unleashed Brands and its affiliated companies have seen significant growth over the past year, according to founder and CEO Michael O. Browning Jr. "Diane brings great experience to this position, and her role will continue to support the growth and the culture at Unleashed Brands," he said in a statement. Sanford has more than 25 years of experience in human resources…
-
Fire Meets Ice: Solo Stove Family of Brands Brings Portable Air Conditioning Into Its Outdoor LineupSolo Brands, with its hallmark commitment to consumer passion and community engagement, is adding IcyBreeze Cooling to its outdoor lifestyle product portfolio. The deal was finalized on July 1, as announced by Generational Equity, a Richardson-based mergers and acquisitions adviser for privately held businesses. In a statement, Generational Equity's Michael Goss said the deal is the realization of a "vision and plan" set out alongside Sweetwater-based IcyBreeze President John Brinkman in August 2022. Financial terms were not disclosed. Goss, the firm's executive managing director of M&As in the central region, described the alliance as a "perfect pairing of Fire (Solo…
-
Save the Elephants will deploy a small fleet of drones equipped with high resolution and infrared cameras to capture elephant behavioral data, which will then be processed by Colossal’s machine learning core to develop algorithms that will label elephants and automatically identify individual and collective social behavior.
