Edmodo

Edmodo was founded on September 1, 2008 by Nic Borg and Jeff O'Hara, two IT staffers who had spent years working as technicians in public schools in the Chicago area, along with co-founder Crystal Hutter. Frustrated by how absent modern technology was from K-12 classrooms, the pair built a free, private, Facebook-like social network that let teachers share assignments, quizzes, notifications and resources with students, while keeping the environment closed to student-to-student direct messaging. The product grew virally among teachers with no marketing spend, going from roughly 500,000 users at the end of 2010 to about 5 million users in 60,000 schools by December 2011, when the company raised a $15 million Series B co-led by Greylock Partners and Benchmark Capital -- Greylock's first investment in the company, bringing Reid Hoffman and Benchmark's Matt Cohler onto the board. Growth continued rapidly: by mid-2012 Edmodo had crossed 8 million registered users and reached 85 of the largest 100 U.S. school districts (including Chicago Public Schools, Denver Public Schools, and districts in Delaware, Florida, Nevada and North Carolina), prompting a $25 million Series C in July 2012 led by New Enterprise Associates, with Greylock, Benchmark, Union Square Ventures and Learn Capital participating.

In March 2013, Edmodo made its first and only acquisition, acquiring Palo Alto-based educational app startup Root-1, whose co-founder Vibhu Mittal (a former Xerox PARC, Carnegie Mellon and Google researcher) became CTO and, in December 2014, Edmodo's second CEO, succeeding co-founder Crystal Hutter (who had become CEO in February 2013 and then moved to President). The company opened a developer API and app marketplace, launched the Snapshot assessment tool in 2014, and partnered with Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press to distribute content. An August 2014 $30 million Series D led by Index Ventures (with KDDI's Open Innovation Fund participating) valued Edmodo as one of the largest and best-known 'freemium' EdTech platforms, with roughly 36-45 million teachers and students across more than 200,000 schools and nearly 200 countries by the end of 2014, and cumulative venture funding of about $87.5 million. Additional investors named across Edmodo's cap table over time included Union Square Ventures, Tenaya Capital, SingTel and KDDI, though the amounts and dates of every individual financing were not all independently disclosed.

Edmodo continued to grow into the mid-2010s, becoming a fixture in many U.S. classrooms and a globally recognized brand in EdTech, competing directly with Google Classroom and Schoology as the market's classroom-communication and learning-management tools. In May 2017 the company disclosed a major data breach affecting roughly 77 million user accounts (usernames, hashed/salted passwords and emails), though no evidence emerged of school data misuse. By the time of its acquisition, Edmodo reported more than 90 million registered users across roughly 400,000 schools in 192 countries, and had been recommended by UNESCO for distance learning. On April 8, 2018, China-based NetDragon Websoft Holdings Limited announced it would acquire 100% of Edmodo for US$137.5 million in cash and stock (shares of NetDragon's education subsidiary, at a pre-acquisition valuation of $1.8 billion), aiming to fold Edmodo into NetDragon's broader learning-community and Promethean interactive-education portfolio.

Business model

Freemium: the core social/classroom-communication network was free for teachers, students and schools; the company monetized via paid add-on products layered on top of the free network.

Paid assessment product (Snapshot, roughly $1,275-$2,000 per school per year), paid professional-development services for teachers ($2,500 for a one-day in-person training, $7,500 for a six-week online course for up to 25 teachers), and a revenue share on paid apps sold through the Edmodo app marketplace/store. The core network itself was never a direct revenue source.