Your Tech Story

education technology

Instructure

Instructure, Best known as the publisher of Canvas providing a web-based educational solution.

We must admit that the past two years have been the toughest for the education sector. Schools and colleges being closed have raised many questions about the future of the young generation. Every government has tried to keep up with the education for schools and higher education institutions, but the best solutions came from the private sector in the form of educational software (LMS) and online websites. Companies that have been promoting online education through LMSs have come to the rescue and have helped the students to stay updated with their educational needs. Not only for the schools and other educational institutes but for the small to big companies, these LMSs have been like a boon. One of such LMS development companies includes Instructure.
Best known as the publisher of Canvas, Instructure is a thirteen years old American educational technology company. The company provides a web-based educational solution for K-12 students to students pursuing higher education as well as for corporate training.

About the Company

Instructure is an Educational Technology and Learning Management Systems provider from the US. The company headquarters is based in Salt Lake City, Utah, US, and it operates from seven different locations in the US, serving its clients from all over the world. As per the 2019 records, over 1200 people are working for Instructure, and the company made annual revenues worth $209.5 million in 2018. The Instructure educational products include Canvas, Catalog, Studio, Portfolium, MasteryConnect, Videri, CASE Benchmarks, and Item Bank, Navigate Item Bank, Academic Benchmarks, Certify, DataConnect, Program Assessment, Pathways, Canvas for Corporate Education, etc. Among all the products by Instructure, Canvas is the most popular product of the company.

Instructure
Image source: philonedtech.com

The Back Story

Brian Whitmer and Devlin Daley founded Instructure in 2008 when they were still at college. They were graduate students at BYU. The idea of Instructure came from the bad experience that the two co-founders had with the existing LMSs. They thought the existing ones were outdated, and no LMS developer companies were planning to upgrade them. Thus the two developed a new LMS under their newly built company, Instructure.
Josh Coates, the founder of Mozy, was the first investor the company got. He also became the first CEO of Instructure for the years 2010-2018. Instructure bagged its first big contract from Utah Education Network (UEN) in 2010, replacing Blackboard (one of the most preferred LMS of that time) in almost every college and university in the Utah area.
In 2011, the company launched officially Canvas LMS and made it available as open-source software for free. The software was also launched for iOS and Android devices. By 2013, the company reached almost 300 schools and colleges and built a customer base of 9 million users. The same year, Instructure held a Series D Funding raising $30 Million.
In 2015, Instructure came with its corporate LMS named Bridge and held a Series E funding raising $40 million. The company went public in November of the same year and started trading on New York Stock Exchange. The next year, the company was ranked number 4 on its Best Places to Work list by Glassdoor, whereas in 2018, it was ranked number 6 in the “Top Work Places” for large businesses list by Salt Lake Tribune. In March 2020, Thoma Bravo acquired Instructure for a sum of $2 billion. Thoma Bravo operates as its parent company, whereas Instructure operates as an independent company.

The Founders

Steve Daly is the current CEO of Instructure. He has a BS degree in Mechanical Engineering from Brigham Young University (BYU). Daly has also got an MBA in Strategy and Finance from the same university. He started his career as a Mechanical Designer at Glumac and Associates. Later Daly became the Director of Marketing at Intel and stayed at the company for ten years. After leaving Intel in 2002, he joined Soronti in 2003 as the CEO but then switched to Avocent Corporation to become the Senior Vice President, Corporate Strategy in 2003. He has also worked as the chairman and CEO of Ivanti for ten years. In July 2002, Daly joined Instructure as its CEO.

Bol.com

Daniel Ropers’s Entrepreneurial Journey Takes A Pause After Springer Nature

Daniel Ropers says it becomes a great commitment towards professional work especially when it comes to education. The former CEO of Springer Nature captured the attention of one and all when he decided to step down. Daniel Ropers is very famous in the business world especially as the former CEO and co-founder of Bol.com other than Springer Nature. He stepped down from his position at Springer Nature in September 2019. We come across a lot of great personalities in our daily lives. And, in the business world, it has become quite common to spot business tycoons rising from nothing. Daniel Ropers, the former CEO of Springer Nature, has created a very significant position for him in the business world. He has recently left the company and his resignation took place very smoothly. So, let’s have a look into his entrepreneurial journey.

Education of Daniel Ropers

Daniel went to ESSEC Business School in 1995 to study Global Economics and Business Studies. He also completed his master’s in Business Economics and graduated in 1997. He always a niche for business development and thus established his career by serving infamous companies around the world.

Professional World

Daniel started his career with McKinsey & Company. In 1997, he joined the company as a Management Consultant and continued for a couple of years. In 2000, Daniel after co-founding Bol.com joined the same as the CEO of the company. He worked at the company for seventeen years. In 2010, he became a Supervisory Board Member of the Telegraaf Media Groep.

After leaving Bol.com, he joined Springer Nature which he left after two years. Daniel witnessed the growth of Bol.com from the beginning as it was founded in 1999. While he served at Bol.com, it emerged out as one of the most popular retailers in the Netherlands and Belgium.

Daniel’s Leadership in Bol.com

The newly built company of 1999 excelled under the leadership of Daniel Ropers. Daniel showed great interest in companies related to academics. Bol.com started its business as a company that sells books online and Springer also encompasses academic publishing.

When Bol.com was established in 1999 it only had a handful of customers which after three years turned to millions. Once landing bigger customers, the company decided to expand its business and started selling electronics as well. So, in 2004, the company expanded its product range and witnessed more than 5 million orders in total.

The company didn’t entertain a huge number of employees. Bol.com comprised of fifty team members in 2006. This year, the annual revenue of the company summed up to €100 million. In 2008, the company launched its first personalized newsletter. Bol.com expanded its business to Belgium, thus collaborating with the local retailers and expanding their products.

Once Bol.com started going international, they needed more employees for the abroad offices. In 2014, the companies employees increased by twenty times as it was ten years ago. Eventually, the company also introduced same-day delivery. This was a good strategy for a company like Bol.com as it also started selling products needed in everyday life. Under the leadership of Daniel, the company went international, expanded its products, improved its delivery timings, etc.

Springer Nature

Springer Nature is a company or rather academic publishing exclusively for journals, academic researches, scholarships, etc. Daniel joined the company in 2017, two years after its founding. Springer Nature was formed by merging more than a couple of companies. It includes Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan Education, Springer Science, and Business Media. The merging was finally completed in May 2015 and the maximum shareholder was Holtzbrinck (Macmillan Education).

Daniel was already a business mastermind when he joined Springer Nature. So, it was expected of the company to grow bigger under his supervision. Under Daniel’s rule, the company developed excellent group strategies and planning for the future.

Daniel said that education is the foundation of every step we take today. We might have become huge business tycoons, but without proper education, it wouldn’t have been possible. Within two years, Daniel was greatly attached to the company and more than that with the purpose served. He said it is hard to leave the company. But, at the same time, he needed a break from twenty-five years of this life.

CollegeDekho Raises $8M in the Series B funding, Plans to Add More Educational Institutions to the Platform

CollegeDekho, the Indian ed tech platform, went through its round of Series B funding, where it has raised $8 million. The company’s existing investors, including GirnarSoft Education and Man Capital, including the other investors, raised the funding, who also raised a $2 million in the Series A round for the company in 2018.

collegedekho
Image Sourec: whizsky.com

GirnarSoft Education is the parent company of CollegeDekho, a startup based in Gurugram India, that helps the students to connect with different colleges so that they can choose the right college for their higher studies. A chatbot has been set on the app to respond to the basic queries from the students. The students can also refer to the website or the app for information to know more about various colleges in which they are interested, like their location, courses they offer, and the fee structure, etc. They can also track their exams, and the other activities going on in the colleges, through the CollegeDekho app.

The company has even hired over 3000 customer care executives to ensure that the users get access to all the information they want. Those executives also help the students with the recommendations for colleges according to their interest and knowledge.

The stats given by the company claims that it entertains more than five million sessions from students on the platform every month, and over 8000 students took the help of CollegeDekho for their college admissions last year.

With a seed funding of $1 million from GirnarSoft Education, Ruchir Arora founded the company in 2015, and since then, the company has raised $13 million. The company plans to use the capital to enhance the boundaries for the platform so that it can serve the users by connecting with more colleges and educational institutions in India as well as abroad.

The company aims to help those students who after completing high school, due to lack of knowledge, are not able to find the best suitable college for them. In fact, due to less literacy rate, the parents of those students suffer from the dilemma of opting for the right choice for their children.

CollegeDekho makes its profits by charging a minimal fee from the students. Last year, the calculated revenue for the company was $3.2 million, which is pretty impressive. The company has listed over 36,000 certified educational institutes on the CollegeDekho app.