Riley Walker grew up in a Maine town with a population of 3,072. His sister was an artist who struggled in a rigid school system that offered little room for creativity.
Watching her sparked a question that has guided his entire career. How do you make learning personal? How do you make it matter for every student rather than forcing them into the same mold?
Those questions now shape ryco, a Tampa education technology company building custom curriculum and interactive learning tools for schools and businesses.
From textbooks to technology
Walker’s path into education began by chance. As a college student waiting tables, he met a theoretical particle physicist who ran an educational publishing company.
He asked for a job. The physicist agreed on one condition. Before designing products, Walker had to become a writer.
For four years, he wrote textbooks in advanced mathematics and software and managed professors from Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh.
By 22, he was leading teams building early gamified learning programs for schools and performing arts centers. Digital art and interactive learning were still niche ideas, but he saw the future taking shape.
Building ryco from the ground up
After leaving publishing, Walker launched a marketing firm that helped small educational publishers sell directly to schools. It worked, but he wanted to build something larger.
During the pandemic, former colleagues turned to him for help shifting to remote learning. At first, he wrote, coded and designed everything himself. As demand grew, he hired a stronger team.
That became ryco, headquartered at Embarc Collective in Tampa, with nine full-time team members in the city and a remote team in South Africa.
The group works on a virtual campus modeled after a retro video game. “Imagine Mario, but for education,” he says.
Reimagining the classroom
Walker wants to replace the old textbook model with adaptive content that fits each student.
He argues that big publishers often lock districts into ten-year licenses for materials that no longer meet their needs. Teachers filled the gaps by writing their own lessons late at night.
ryco builds curriculum based on each school’s goals, whether it is special education, advanced STEM instruction or career training. Using artificial intelligence, the company helps educators generate lessons, videos and gamified modules on demand.
Each client works with a project manager who is a former teacher. “Teachers talk to teachers,” Walker says. “We can build anything from a new AP course to a full virtual reality simulation.”
A platform designed for schools
Ryco began by working with major publishers such as National Geographic Learning to help them develop products they later branded and sold. That revenue allowed Walker to scale without outside investment.
Today, ryco builds programs for schools across the country, from New York to Los Angeles. The company also created a platform that lets schools submit project requests and maintain full ownership of anything ryco creates.
“Everything we build for them is theirs,” he says. “They can monetize it, license it or keep it unique to their students.”
Beyond K-12
The company recently expanded into corporate training, bringing its interactive approach to employee onboarding and professional development.
Every business has training and retention needs. ryco helps teams learn faster and more effectively using content that mirrors what they build for schools. In the first week of offering corporate training, the company sold five projects.
“It is a shorter sales cycle than education,” Walker says. “But the same skills apply. You make learning relevant.”
Built in Tampa
Walker is based at Embarc Collective, where he leads a Founders Forum for local tech entrepreneurs.
He says Tampa’s energy and collaboration make it one of the best places in the country to build a technology company. The mission that started in small-town Maine has not changed.
“Education should not be one size fits all,” he says. “We want every learner to discover their own path.”
Why it matters
A Tampa startup is challenging a $100 billion education publishing industry with teacher-driven design, AI-powered customization and growth across schools and corporate learning.
Ryco’s work shows that, even with rapid advances in technology, the future of education remains human.
