Lumos Capital Group has announced an agreement to acquire Open Up Resources, according to a LinkedIn post dated October 26, 2026. The purchase amount was not disclosed in the sources.
The post, which credits Matthew Tower with uncovering the transaction, says it received essentially no press coverage. It describes Open Up Resources as having been funded by the Gates Foundation, Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The Robin Hood Foundation and Schusterman Family Philanthropies, and says the organization is becoming a public benefit corporation.
The author of the post places the deal in a list of what they call non-profits becoming for-profits in K-12 education, alongside other transactions: Great Minds' 2026 acquisition of AERDF-funded Magpie Literacy, ACT's acquisition by private equity in 2024, NWEA's acquisition by Houghton Mifflin in 2023, Great Minds becoming a for-profit in 2020, and AIR's 2019 sale of its K-12 assessment division to Cambium.
The post raises questions about how such transactions work, including whether they are better deals for acquirers because there are no shareholders to buy out, or whether the philanthropies benefit, and whether organizations change how they serve customers after becoming private companies. It also asks how many sales Open Up Resources won because schools were attracted to a non-profit, and what that means for the sector. The author states they have never looked at Open Up Resources materials and are not judging their quality, and that their company, Once Reading, does not compete with Open Up Resources.
The post quotes Larry Berger and Dave Stevenson's "Slow Entry, Distant Exit" on the tension between education as a public good and a private industry, including the observation that public and private funders give away for free the things entrepreneurs are trying to turn into businesses.