Laid Off by the DoE — Then He Built an AI Startup | David Blumenthal

We Built It Because We Had To - Tech Founder Backstories · May 19, 2026 · 22m

When the U.S. Department of Education was dismantled, David Blumenthal lost his 13-year career as an education researcher in a single March 2025 Zoom call. Three weeks later, his daughter was born. Somewhere between 2 AM and 3 AM bottle feeds, he started plotting his next chapter. The result is Eddy — a RAG-based AI tool for teachers built on 400,000+ peer-reviewed journal articles that cuts through academic jargon and cites every recommendation back to its source.In this episode of We Built It Because We Had To, David walks through the twin trust problem educators face (distrust of academic…