If building the infrastructure to bring technology into schools is something you'd like to work on, we could use your help! Lots of open positions @ https://clever.com/about/jobs - or send me an email (dan@clever.com).
I work in an entirely different field, but I just wanted to say congratulations. So many startups I read about on HN, techcrunch, or wherever are focused on some odd niche to improve the lives of those who are already well-off. It seems like your tech has the potential to improve fundamentally important things across a broad swathe of society, and that's really encouraging from my perspective.
Are you US only? When I looked at your site last time I think it was all implicitly US specific. Have you thought about expanding to the UK/Australia/NZ? The tools I've seen in schools (I don't have wide experience) don't seem very good.
Congratulations, Clever! Though I am building a competing SaaS which approaches/solves things a bit differently (e.g. purely functional, event stream processing based, simple DSLs as lenses on said streams to apply business rules, ability to push into SISs like IC, non-deterministic client endpoints with lazy eval (yay, scalaz-stream), execution sharding, dynamic horizontal scaling via actors, ability to have district data never leave their DCs, etc), it is nice to see progressive companies in this realm have success and ultimately make a difference in student outcomes. You are a much needed breathe of fresh air in education. Here is to hoping that in the future you branch out and solve more problems (e.g. cross-system analytics seems like a possible next step with all that juicy data linked) :)
Why is it that some articles about VC investments include valuation info (or enough information to calculate valuation) and some don't? There is no valuation information for this particular post. As an outsider, I don't understand why would a company (or VC) would choose to release or withhold that information.
Clever is a brilliant company: I've had clients in K12 app development for years and Clever provides a stable target for integrations with student information systems.
I'm rooting for Clever to grow into higher ed, especially starting with the edX.org schools. I see enormous potential for integrations among edX open source software and the various backend university IT systems ranging from Oracle Business to legacy COBOL to in-house apps built with Java, Ruby, Python, etc.
Higher Ed is a whole different fish and the competitors in that space have resources. I wish you all the luck in the world. I'd love to help out but nowhere near SF!
