![]() “I've been a fan of theirs for a long time. “I’m delighted to be with Lightspeed,” Draper says. Challenge accepted.’”īeing acquired by Lightspeed will help CatchOn grow and reach more students and educators. “They said, ‘If you can do that, you'll be solving one of the biggest problems in K-12 education. Schools had limited data on technology usage and much of the data they had was being filtered through the companies they worked with, which had a high potential for bias.ĭraper asked if a program that would work as a black box on an airplane, and show district leaders where kids went online and what tools they utilized, would be helpful. It was being used more, but it wasn't necessarily being effectively used and used in a way that could really benefit education as a whole.”ĭraper met with many school leaders and realized they had minimal systems in place to measure what technology was purchased, how or even whether it was used, and what the overall return on investment was. And I had this assumption from my own experience in school, that they didn't fully grasp it. “I wanted them to really understand and harness the full power and potential that technology provided classrooms and teachers and students. “The overarching problem that I wanted to help school districts solve was how to use technology efficiently and effectively,” she says. How Will This Acquisition Help CatchOn?ĬatchOn was founded by Draper in 2016. “Because CatchOn’s product was at least 18 months to 24 months ahead of the Lightspeed analytics product, and I had great faith in Jena's alignment with Lightspeed, we thought that the merger of two companies would be really exciting,” Thomas says. And she was, honestly, doing it before us, and doing a better job,” Thomas says.ĭraper and Thomas have long been friends, and when Thomas learned that ENA was going to sell CatchOn, he was interested in acquiring the company. “Jena and the CatchOn team were developing agents of their own and technology that was also solving analytics problems. This type of technology is what led Draper to form CatchOn in 2016. ![]() However, members of the company realized there was other potentially useful information about learning that could be gathered at the same time, and that the company could move into “a form of analytics.” “Those agents allowed us to do mobile device management, classroom management, and a product called Alert, which is our human review and artificial intelligence that allows us to predict if a student is at risk of harming themselves or others,” Thomas says. The company utilizes patented agents to provide web filtering for school districts. Lightspeed technology reaches more than 20 million students in 39 countries and 32,000 schools globally. Thomas says he and other executives at Lightspeed were interested in both CatchOn’s mission to help leaders to accurately assess their online software application investments and the data and analytics technology the company had developed.
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