Draft:Clever (company)

Clever

Type of business	Private
Type of site	Educational technology
Founded	2012
Headquarters	San Francisco, California
Country of origin	United States
Owner	Kahoot! (as of 2021)
Founder(s)	Tyler Bosmeny Dan Carroll Rafael Garcia

Clever is an American educational technology company. It was founded by three Harvard University graduates—Tyler Bosmeny, Dan Carroll, and Rafael Garcia—in 2012 and sought to provide a centralized platform for school systems to transfer student data and provide services to students. By 2017, Clever raised $60 million in venture capital, was used to support millions of students in the United States, and was ranked number four in The Wall Street Journal's Tech Companies to Watch. It was acquired by Kahoot! in 2021.

History

Bosmeny, Carroll, and Garcia met as undergraduates at Harvard University. In 2012, they founded Clever in the San Francisco Bay Area out of a need to streamline and centralize digital platforms for educators while making app connections easier; Bosmeny was its chief executive officer, Garcia was its chief technology officer, and Carroll was its chief product officer. Carroll, a former teacher at Teach For America, had seen "how frustrating it was for students and teachers to access the multiple learning apps that were being used in class"—especially as educational technology was gradually becoming a bigger part of classrooms.

The same year of its founding, Clever was brought on to Y Combinator in April with the goal of on-boarding 40 schools by the end of the year; it on-boarded over 2,000 by October. By then, it raised $3 million in seed funding from firms like SV Angel, Google Ventures, and Bessemer Venture Partners, as well as funders like Mitch Kapor, Mike Maples, Jr., and Ashton Kutcher. Clever also acquired funding personally from Y Combinator's partners including Sam Altman, Aaron Iba, Jessica Livingston, Garry Tan, Paul Buchheit, and Harj Taggar, as well as entrepreneurs in educational technology like John Katzman, Aayush Phumbhra, Deborah Quazzo, and Matt MacInnis.

By 2015, Clever raised a total of $43 million from firms like Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund, and GSV Capital. That year, in The New York Times, administrators from Boston school districts shared that Clever allowed them to "select which specific details about a student to transfer. They can also decide whether to share that information for students in an entire district or, for example, the entire eighth grade or a particular elementary school." Clever's dashboard ultimately allowed them to save time and resources on manually setting up accounts, transferring information between sheets and programs, and otherwise setting up student rosters in a litany of apps.

The New York Times also raised questions around "Whether Clever is sustainable as a stand-alone business"; some app developers in educational technology stated "it was not yet clear whether the service would prove to be the ultimate solution for schools to manage learning app accounts, or merely a transitional technology." Toward that, Racine stated: "We're solving the challenges of today while iterating as fast as we can to solve the problems they’ll have tomorrow." However, according to TechCrunch, Clever no longer needed to raise money after 2016 after having raised approximately $60 million in total.

From then on, Clever was expanding its reach across the United States and operating on stable finances. By 2017, The Washington Post reported that Clever was being used in "about 70,000 public and private schools across the U.S." or "roughly half of the schools" in the United States; they also reached "more than 200,000 connections" between schools and apps, a 50% increase from the previous year. By then, the company was valued at over $250 million. In 2021, Clever ran on a cash flow neutral basis and forecasted "$44 million in billed revenues... with an annual revenue growth rate of approximately 25% CAGR in the last three years".

In 2022, former Wake County middle school teacher Trish Sparks became the chief executive officer of Clever. She had worked in Clever's San Francisco Bay Area office as a vice president of customer success for a year before moving back to North Carolina to work in the company's new Durham office in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Acquisition

In May of 2021, the Oslo-based education technology company Kahoot! acquired Clever. By then, TechCrunch reported that Clever was being "used by 89,000 schools and some 65% of K-12 school districts (13,000 overall) in the U.S." which roughly equated to "20 million students logging in monthly and 5.6 billion learning sessions." Of the acquisition, Kahoot! stated:

... we see considerable potential to collaborate on education innovation to better service all our users—schools, teachers, students, parents and lifelong learners—and leveraging our global scale to offer Clever’s unique platform worldwide. I’m excited to welcome Tyler and his team to the Kahoot family.

While numbers were not disclosed, Kahoot! placed "a value of $435 million to $500 million" on Clever during its acquisition deal. Under the agreement, Clever would remain its own independent company while integrating Kahoot! apps onto its digital platform and also expanding Clever outside of the United States to over 200 countries where Kahoot! has been used.