Clever (YC S12) Gets $30M to Become the Login Layer for Education Apps

http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/16/clever-30m-lightspeed/

by sethbannon • 12 years ago

93 27 12 years ago

sethbannon• 12 years ago

Using technology to spur innovation in the education space is so easy to get behind.

I think many people might not realize how much education has changed since they were in school (K-12) - there are now hundreds of educational apps specializing in all parts of the curriculum.

It's crazy to organize (hence why Clever is loved by schools) but the proliferation of apps is very useful for teachers to find the right tools for them.

schimmy_changa4• 12 years ago

(also I should probably mention that I work for Clever!)

ZeroFries• 12 years ago

How does this education ecosystem change in other developed countries? Do they have the same abundance of apps and options? Does clever have any plans on moving into these other countries (Canada, Europe, Australia)?

schimmy_changa4• 12 years ago

hmm - I can't really speak about the differences (sorry!), and have to be lame and punt your 'future plans' question to the quote from our CEO: “Our goal is to help all schools, and that includes international as well,” Bosmeny told me

wooyi• 12 years ago

Colin - does that mean Clever is now more an App Store for schools? How relevant is the data APIs to SISes and the stuff that was initially Clever.

schimmy_changa4• 12 years ago

Very essential - account provisioning / the API is the first step for an app to be useful to a teacher / students. As the top-rated comment suggests, we only help schools share the basic 'student 123 is in class 456'-type data with apps to allow this. (see the docs for more: https://clever.com/developers)

We then added Instant Login since we found it was a huge pain point, and similarly it is very lightweight.

You're right that it has more and more features that you'd expect from an app store, but that was true before Instant Login as well :)

hashtree2• 12 years ago

First, congrats on the raising of funds!

Last time I spoke with higher ups at Clever, it was mentioned that deep integrations were not on the roadmap (e.g. pushing into SISes like Infinite Campus for things like health, attendance, grades, etc). Some of that has to do with how the problem is being approached technically at Clever, IMO. While tackling student logins and thin system integrations is cool, are there yet plans to go deeper?

For a time, I had very seriously considered entering this particular space as a competitor, as I am referred to do integrations, where Clever falls short, for districts on an almost weekly basis (which I decline these days). As a competitor, it was my intention to include extremely deep/bi-directional integrations with all systems (including SISes, like Infinite Campus), purely horizontally scaling infrastructure, process/data isolation (security and privacy is a huge concern for districts), distributed processing so that data never need to leave local district data centers, taking functional/stream programming concepts to allow for fully customized integrations per-district built on the same base for each directional system integration, mock integrations for staff members to play with their rules, etc. It can all be done on a technical front (I did on a per-district basis, many times), but I eventually decided it wasn't a great fit for where I wanted to go in business.

I mention all this because I hope someone, perhaps you Clever (knowing you are HNers), addresses this huge need by the districts. So much energy is being spent on things that shouldn't be issues at all... It's a horrible joke that districts have to spend energy on unified login systems, but it is also a joke that moving grades/attendance back and forth between systems for state reporting, for instance. It is not something teachers should have to spend time on. Syncing of student accounts, teacher accounts, admin accounts, enrollments for each, courses, sections, permissions, grades, attendance, health, ILPs, RtI, etc.. it goes on and on. You have the funding and man-power to pull it off, I'd love to see it.

hashtree2• 12 years ago

BTW, with deeper integrations... you open up some unique opportunities to solve big problems for districts:

Done right, deep integrations mean you, in-effect, have a way to get to all data within a district (data warehouses go for six to eight figures and districts eat it up, as you know). The power of being able to get to data district-wide... You have that obvious route for analytics and reporting now, but what if you were to take the next step... ML/NLP/AI... you can do truly interesting work now. Measure teacher effectiveness, dropout prediction well before it occurs, academic achievement prediction to catch kids before teachers can (because you see the whole picture), recommending interventions that have worked for students in similar scenarios, etc. Now that's cool.

robbiemitchell• 12 years ago

"Recommending interventions" is a piece of what Knewton does. But we don't need PII or demographic data to do it. We are integrated with the digital course materials (Pearson, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Cengage, etc.) and work inside those products to provide real-time student recommendations, predictive analytics for teachers (intervene ahead of time), and content insights for publishers to change content or create more where it's needed most.

billsossoon• 12 years ago

This is great stuff, but technically it seems to go pretty far beyond what Clever is achieving. The company's value seems to hinge more on positioning itself appropriately (establishing itself as the primary educational app store) rather than doing anything technically ambitious. From a business standpoint, this probably isn't a bad idea.

jimbokun• 12 years ago

So Clever is the App Store for education?

maxpain• 12 years ago

anyone know the valuation?

greattypo• 12 years ago

We’re also hiring. We have some extremely ambitious goals, and we need more great engineers to hit them. Check us out at https://clever.com/about/jobs or let me know if you'd like to learn more: dan.mccarthy@clever.com

23david• 12 years ago

Awesome^3. Keep it up :-)

bsder• 12 years ago

Um, is anybody NOT overly happy about this?

I'm not happy to have yet another centralized login system. I'm not happy to have yet another company collecting analytics. I'm especially not happy that those analytics are about children.

I was going to slag startups about security, but, hell, big companies don't bother either, so that would be unfair.

2arrs2ells2• 12 years ago

Thanks for raising this issue. I'm one of the founders of Clever, a former educator, & super privacy conscious. I'm really proud of the work we're doing for a few big reasons:

1. When schools adopt Clever, they often tell us about the way they were setting up software previously. It's always inefficient (i.e. teachers hand-entering class lists every week), but all too often insecure (i.e. faxing attendance sheets, or emailing XLS files to a support team). Clever improves both efficiency and security dramatically.

2. Without centralized login systems, teachers report just getting their class logged in to an app takes 25% of class time on average. The friction of using technology is preventing students from learning. Clever eliminates that friction.

3. Clever is a tool schools use to manage their applications. They manage data sharing & own any data in Clever (our TOS & Privacy Policy make this very clear).

Please let me know (dan@clever.com) if you have suggestions for how we can improve privacy or security for students. It's our top priority & one of the biggest reasons we raised this round.

mikegioia• 12 years ago

    teachers report just getting their class logged in to
    an app takes 25% of class time on average

That sounds made-up to me. That would imply some classes spend upwards of 40% of their time logging kids in to an app?

    Clever improves both efficiency and security dramatically.

How? Also how is faxing/emailing attendance sheets any less secure than routing their precious data through your servers?

jsprogrammer• 12 years ago

For one, post your code.

Also, if I can't get to it from the front page of your website (and it doesn't look like I can), it doesn't exist.

pentelkuru• 12 years ago

You don't really address the issue. I'll admit you're in a tough spot though, since there's no real way to disprove that you won't sell the data you collect about students. Maintaining trust will be important.

It appears your service is:

(a) an API that collects student data from schools and then parcels it out to school-approved educational apps that have paid for access to your gateway.

(b) an OAuth login system like Facebook/Twitter/Google login.

I'm not sure if this is correct though, since your website doesn't clearly explain this (it does have a picture of Magnus Carlsson playing chess in your office though, which is pretty cool).

So then I guess your business model is to become the middleman between educational software and schools? Educational software companies will pay you to sell their software in your educational app store, similar to how Apple and Google take a 30% cut in their app stores? (edit: I just read below that you also charge the vendors of the student database software). In exchange, apps get visibility to schools and streamlined access to student data, and teachers get a convenient system for installing educational software?

That sounds good. I have no idea what schools budget for apps and educational software, but I imagine it will increase if Chromebooks and iPads become more commonplace in classrooms.

rblatz• 12 years ago

So what does this offer that a distributed system like shibboleth doesn't offer?

Clever (YC S12) Gets $30M to Become the Login Layer for Education Apps

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