Why ed-tech startups Clever and Nearpod are expected to sell for a combined $1 billion

By Benjamin Herold — June 09, 2021  for Education Week

On the first Friday in May, Tyler Bosmeny called an all-staff Zoom meeting for 9 a.m. The sale of his company—ed-tech juggernaut Clever, founded in 2012 and now used by more than half the country’s 50 million public school students—had been announced the previous evening. The CEO planned on striking his usual optimistic-but-pragmatic tone. But when he saw the faces of his 180 employees staring back from the rectangles on his screen, he was overcome with emotion.

“We achieved more than we ever could have dreamed,” Bosmeny, now 34, explained in an interview this month. “When we launched, there weren’t many examples of companies in the K-12 space that had reached a milestone like this.”

This includes a sticker price that could hit $500 million, to be paid by the Norwegian game-based learning platform Kahoot! when the deal becomes official. The sale marks one of the largest K-12 ed-tech startup exits in history, surpassed in recent memory only by Renaissance Learning’s $650 million acquisition of Nearpod three months earlier.

Click HERE to read the full article from Education Week.

TRiGroup’s Advice: The technology industry is finally stepping up to solve problems in the K-12 market, especially as they relate to two very important issues: 1) integrating various learning platforms with any district’s Student Information System and 2) privacy and security. Strategize internally with your IT and Ed Tech departments and prepare for the ways tech companies will frame the post-pandemic K-12 market.