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Panorama Education, a fast-growing startup that crafts and administers surveys for schools to help teachers and administrators get better insight into how they are performing in areas like learning and social inclusion, is today announcing a $4 million round of seed funding, which it will be using to take its big data approach to education deeper into the U.S. market as well as global.

Panorama and its funding story are eye-catching in more ways than one. Incubated in the Y-Combinator program earlier this year (and one of our top picks in its August 2013 Demo Day), Panorama’s investors now include Startup:Education — the foundation led by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla — SoftTech VC, Google Ventures, Ashton Kutcher’s A-Grade Investments and Yale University, which the co-founders had attended.

This is the first national equity investment from Startup:Education, and it comes three years after its first and only other effort — a $100 million donation to the city of Newark’s school system.

“Priscilla and I are excited to support Panorama Education and its mission. Their company is an exciting example of the way technology can help teachers, parents and students make their voices heard,” said Mark Zuckerberg in a statement.

From what we understand, this will be the first of more equity investments from Startup:Education to come.

Turning back specifically to Panorama, co-founder Aaron Feuer tells me that this seed investment will be used for a few different purposes. The first will be to continue to build out its business in the U.S. market: the company already serves some 4,000 schools covering over 1 million students, which clients including the Connecticut and Colorado state departments of education and most recently the Los Angeles Unified School District (Feuer’s home town) and its 550,000 students. The second, he says, will be to make its first international efforts. This month, the company is partnering with Teach for All to extend its services into 17 countries, starting first with the UK. “These plans are still in flux,” he told me in an interview.

Although Feuer started Panorama in 2010 when he and co-founder Xan Tanner were still undergraduates at Yale, the idea for getting better feedback about how schools are working started back when Feuer was still in high school in Los Angeles. As a student body president at his high school, he led a statewide campaign to bring better feedback into the classroom. “We even got a law passed to do that,” he says. “Everyone loved the idea, but the problem was that it was too hard to actually do it.” Enter Panorama.

What’s interesting to me about Panorama is that while a lot of startups today are led by innovations in technology that then seek out interesting applications, this startup has taken the other route — the one espoused also by companies like Uber and Airbnb — to use technology as the means, and not the end. Or, as Feuer says it, “We didn’t want to start a startup, but it was the best way to solve the problem.”

So far, its formula seems to be working: the company, he says works with school districts to identify issues, conceive of what questions need to get asked, and how to ask them. It then provides a mixture of formats for its surveys — spanning digital/online questionaires, but also paper surveys and phone interviews — anything to get the data. Then it uses its own people and systems to subsequently analyse and parse the data. When schools have opted in, anonymised data from across other surveys is also combined with existing information to form more complete and comparative analysis. Pricing for services varies depends on a number of factors, and Feuer declines to say how much the company is currently making. (Back in August when it had around 3,000 clients, it was on a runrate of about $500,000 for the year.) More importantly, “We haven’t come across a school district yet that has said it can’t afford us,” Feuer told me, a nod to both the essentiality of what it’s doing, and its pricing.