Adam Newman, a lifelong social entrepreneur and executive, co-founded Literacy Tree along with Stephanie Newman, a lifelong English language educator, Orton-Gilingham specialist and team-builder. After their youngest son was diagnosed with dyslexia, Adam and Stephanie recognized the opportunity to address the national deficiency in literacy by joining forces to combine the Science of Reading, a team of expert teachers, and the leadership and technology to scale and impact children nationally. Adam focuses on expanding Literacy Tree’s reach, team and capabilities to reach more parents, children and schools. 

Adam is also founder and CEO of the Hustlefund-backed startup Pyrl.io, the world's first purchase privacy platform. Pyrl's mission is to give consumers the privacy and usage of their most valuable information. Pyrl returns trust to consumer relationships by removing data-abusive platforms from commerce, utilizing emerging privacy laws across the U.S. The concept behind Pyrl was sparked when Adam lost his father to cancer, and began researching why it is that consumers have no way to see the item-level product purchases they have made that could affect a family’s health over time. 

Adam has always been passionate about tackling issues central to the lives of all Americans. Prior to Literacy Tree and Pyrl, in response to the Financial Crisis of 2008 he served as Founding Executive and Chief Operating Officer of Common Securitization Solutions (CSS), where he led a 500-person team to build and run the first national platform to transform and standardize the U.S. housing finance industry’s issuance and management of securities. CSS is a joint venture across the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac that helped to standardize U.S. housing finance after the crisis and which now returns about $500M annually back to U.S. taxpayers. 

The first company Adam created automated operations of a large public school district in New York including all IEP and special education student assessment processing. Adam's career also included a stint overseeing platform re-engineering at Arbitron, a public consumer data research company acquired by Neilsen, and he was previously a technology entrepreneur in NYC. 

Adam holds an Engineering degree from the University of Michigan College of Engineering. He serves as a startup mentor with the NYC Fintech Innovation Lab, and enjoys hiking the great outdoors with his kids and their overly energetic black lab rescue pup. He resides in Maryland with his wife and four children.