Clever (YC S12) Gets $30M to Become the Login Layer for Education Apps
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I'm not happy to have yet another centralized login system. I'm not happy to have yet another company collecting analytics. I'm especially not happy that those analytics are about children.
I was going to slag startups about security, but, hell, big companies don't bother either, so that would be unfair.
1. When schools adopt Clever, they often tell us about the way they were setting up software previously. It's always inefficient (i.e. teachers hand-entering class lists every week), but all too often insecure (i.e. faxing attendance sheets, or emailing XLS files to a support team). Clever improves both efficiency and security dramatically.
2. Without centralized login systems, teachers report just getting their class logged in to an app takes 25% of class time on average. The friction of using technology is preventing students from learning. Clever eliminates that friction.
3. Clever is a tool schools use to manage their applications. They manage data sharing & own any data in Clever (our TOS & Privacy Policy make this very clear).
Please let me know (dan@clever.com) if you have suggestions for how we can improve privacy or security for students. It's our top priority & one of the biggest reasons we raised this round.
teachers report just getting their class logged in to
an app takes 25% of class time on average
Clever improves both efficiency and security dramatically.
Being in the industry, I think the 25% number is high. It is a significant frustration especially in lower grades if kids have different username/passwords for every education app they are using during their school week. I think this is a pretty good idea and it helps. However as schools move to Chromebooks more and more I do wonder if schools will push more for vendors to just integrate directly with Google's login since all users have to have a Google account to use the Chromebook. Maybe Clever supports this? I haven't looked into it lately.
The way they improve efficiency is due to fact that schools will no longer need to upload CSV files nightly to vendors servers to update their student rosters. Many inner city schools have a very high degree of student transience (meaning kids move schools a lot) and this is a huge pain to update across multiple vendors every day. A lot of vendors support the upload of CSV files to provide an updated list of student rosters. Imagine how much easier it is for the schools if they don't have to do any of that or only have to integrate with one vendor. I can't speak to the security side and how they improve that really.
They do charge the vendors at the school level and for many vendors their fees can really eat into their margins and so I still think you see a lot of vendors relying on CSV files. Schools are used to doing this and so setting up one more job to upload the same file every night is not a huge burden to them.
In general, "boot up time" for most students was usually fast, but the problem is that the edge cases (students who forgot their password, typed the wrong URL, didn't follow instructions properly, had a technical error) required individual attention, and would quickly eat up time. Many of these problems came from sending students to a web site they hadn't used before, or logging into a service they didn't use often.
I don't work for Clever (I'd disclaim it if I did. I currently work for a different educational tech company) but I can definitely see how a single sign-on for everything would be helpful to teachers.
Fax and email are generally considered much less secure means of transmission than an authenticated HTTPS api. SMTP is generally an unencrypted protocol, for example.
I have developed and support a language portfolio system - I was on site at a high school giving support for one period. I was shocked at how lax most of the students were (well... maybe not) but 25-30% of the students couldn't remember a username/password, even ones they created themselves. In a 45 minute period, 25 minutes were spent giving about a dozen or so students their username/password combos (I was doing manual resets on site to speed the process). It was insane, but I don't see many ways of making it better, short of tying in with edmodo or something similar (maybe clever? but I have no budget for this).
Also, if I can't get to it from the front page of your website (and it doesn't look like I can), it doesn't exist.
It appears your service is:
(a) an API that collects student data from schools and then parcels it out to school-approved educational apps that have paid for access to your gateway.
(b) an OAuth login system like Facebook/Twitter/Google login.
I'm not sure if this is correct though, since your website doesn't clearly explain this (it does have a picture of Magnus Carlsson playing chess in your office though, which is pretty cool).
So then I guess your business model is to become the middleman between educational software and schools? Educational software companies will pay you to sell their software in your educational app store, similar to how Apple and Google take a 30% cut in their app stores? (edit: I just read below that you also charge the vendors of the student database software). In exchange, apps get visibility to schools and streamlined access to student data, and teachers get a convenient system for installing educational software?
That sounds good. I have no idea what schools budget for apps and educational software, but I imagine it will increase if Chromebooks and iPads become more commonplace in classrooms.
Last time I spoke with higher ups at Clever, it was mentioned that deep integrations were not on the roadmap (e.g. pushing into SISes like Infinite Campus for things like health, attendance, grades, etc). Some of that has to do with how the problem is being approached technically at Clever, IMO. While tackling student logins and thin system integrations is cool, are there yet plans to go deeper?
For a time, I had very seriously considered entering this particular space as a competitor, as I am referred to do integrations, where Clever falls short, for districts on an almost weekly basis (which I decline these days). As a competitor, it was my intention to include extremely deep/bi-directional integrations with all systems (including SISes, like Infinite Campus), purely horizontally scaling infrastructure, process/data isolation (security and privacy is a huge concern for districts), distributed processing so that data never need to leave local district data centers, taking functional/stream programming concepts to allow for fully customized integrations per-district built on the same base for each directional system integration, mock integrations for staff members to play with their rules, etc. It can all be done on a technical front (I did on a per-district basis, many times), but I eventually decided it wasn't a great fit for where I wanted to go in business.
I mention all this because I hope someone, perhaps you Clever (knowing you are HNers), addresses this huge need by the districts. So much energy is being spent on things that shouldn't be issues at all... It's a horrible joke that districts have to spend energy on unified login systems, but it is also a joke that moving grades/attendance back and forth between systems for state reporting, for instance. It is not something teachers should have to spend time on. Syncing of student accounts, teacher accounts, admin accounts, enrollments for each, courses, sections, permissions, grades, attendance, health, ILPs, RtI, etc.. it goes on and on. You have the funding and man-power to pull it off, I'd love to see it.
Done right, deep integrations mean you, in-effect, have a way to get to all data within a district (data warehouses go for six to eight figures and districts eat it up, as you know). The power of being able to get to data district-wide... You have that obvious route for analytics and reporting now, but what if you were to take the next step... ML/NLP/AI... you can do truly interesting work now. Measure teacher effectiveness, dropout prediction well before it occurs, academic achievement prediction to catch kids before teachers can (because you see the whole picture), recommending interventions that have worked for students in similar scenarios, etc. Now that's cool.
It's crazy to organize (hence why Clever is loved by schools) but the proliferation of apps is very useful for teachers to find the right tools for them.
We then added Instant Login since we found it was a huge pain point, and similarly it is very lightweight.
You're right that it has more and more features that you'd expect from an app store, but that was true before Instant Login as well :)