A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship refers to all new businesses, including self-employment and businesses that never intend to become registered, startups refer to new businesses that intend to grow large beyond the solo founder. At the beginning, startups face high uncertainty and have high rates of failure, but a minority of them do go on to be successful and influential.
Benchmark is a venture capital firm based in San Francisco that provides seed money to startups.
Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides customer relationship management (CRM) software and applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, analytics, and application development.
GlobalScholar was an operating unit of Scantron based in Bellevue, Washington, that developed, manufactured, licensed, and supported a wide range of products and services related to education. This included products such as an enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, Pinnacle Suite, which supported all aspects of managing education at K-12 schools, including a gradebook, learning management system (LMS), and teacher development, analytics and online learning.
Splunk Inc. is an American software company based in San Francisco, California, that produces software for searching, monitoring, and analyzing machine-generated data via a Web-style interface.
Instructure, Inc. is an educational technology company based in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States. It is the developer and publisher of Canvas, a web-based learning management system (LMS), and MasteryConnect, an assessment management system. The company is owned by private-equity firm Thoma Bravo.
Udemy, Inc. is an education technology company that provides an online learning and teaching platform. It was founded in May 2010 by Eren Bali, Gagan Biyani, and Oktay Caglar.
Stripe, Inc. is an Irish-American financial services and software as a service (SaaS) company dual-headquartered in South San Francisco, California, United States and Dublin, Ireland. The company primarily offers payment processing software and application programming interfaces (APIs) for e-commerce websites and mobile applications.
CircleUp is a financial technology company based in San Francisco that focuses on consumer goods startups. Since its official launch in April 2012, CircleUp has helped several consumer companies raise equity including Back to the Roots, Halo Top Creamery, Little Duck Organics, Rhythm Superfoods and others. General Mills has an investment fund that is partnered with CircleUp to invest in companies listed on the platform.
SendGrid is a Denver, Colorado-based customer communication platform for transactional and marketing email. The company was founded by Isaac Saldana, Jose Lopez, and Tim Jenkins in 2009, and incubated through the Techstars accelerator program. As of 2017, SendGrid has raised over $81 million and has offices in Denver, Colorado; Boulder, Colorado; Irvine, California; Redwood City, California; and London.
Blackboard Inc. was an American educational technology company with corporate headquarters in Reston, VA. It was known for Blackboard Learn, a learning management system. It merged with Anthology in late 2021, with the future name of the combined company not announced yet.
Voxy is an American eLearning company providing institutions with adaptive and personalized instruction for learning English, online and through smartphone apps. Voxy has three million users in more than 20 countries, and in 2013 said it had been rated the best or best-selling iTunes education app in 23 countries. Voxy was founded in February 2010 by Gregg Carey and Paul Gollash. The company is headquartered in New York City, and also has an office in São Paulo, Brazil. Its website is in English, Spanish and Portuguese.
The Alchemist Accelerator is a venture-backed accelerator focused on accelerating the development of seed-stage ventures that monetize from enterprises. CB Insights rated Alchemist the top accelerator in 2016 based on median funding rates of its grads. The accelerator’s primary screening criteria are based on teams, with primacy placed on having distinctive technical co-founders. The organization provides seed investment into companies it admits, and provides founders a structured path to traction, fundraising, mentorship, and community over the course of a six month program. Alchemist's backers include many of the top corporate and VC funds in the Valley—including Khosla Ventures, DFJ, Cisco, Siemens, GE, and Salesforce, among others. The accelerator seeds around 75 enterprise-monetizing ventures per year.
Pluralsight, LLC is an American privately held online education company that offers a variety of video training courses for software developers, IT administrators, and creative professionals through its website. Founded in 2004 by Aaron Skonnard, Keith Brown, Fritz Onion, and Bill Williams, the company has its headquarters in Farmington, Utah. As of July 2018, it uses more than 1,400 subject-matter experts as authors, and offers more than 7,000 courses in its catalog. Since first moving its courses online in 2007, the company has expanded, developing a full enterprise platform, and adding skills assessment modules.
Pipedrive is a cloud-based software as a service company. It is the developer of the web application and mobile app Pipedrive, a sales customer relationship management (CRM) tool. The company has more than 1,000 employees in its eight offices across Europe and two office in the US. Its CRM is used by over 100,000 customers around the world. In 2020, Pipedrive became the fifth Estonian-founded unicorn.
A learning relationship management (LRM) software system manages and facilitates student-led instruction to maximize student engagement, achievement, outcome and long-term success. Unlike learning management systems (LMS) in which elements are organized around specific courses, LRMs are student-centric in design, facilitate personalized learning, and provide individualized learning paths, a central point for analytics data and a way of tracking interventions and related results. The LRM system provides a comprehensive foundation for end-to-end student support", which may include communication with and/or support from a learner network consisting of educators, administrators, parents/guardians, mentors, advisors/guidance counselors, etc.
Madan Padaki is an Indian entrepreneur and business executive. He is the co-founder and director of Sylvant Advisors, in the field of education management; CEO and MD of Head Held High Services, a social enterprise for rural youth, and former co-founder of MeritTrac Services, a skill assessment and testing company. Padaki holds an undergraduate degree in engineering from the National Institute of Engineering, University of Mysore and an MBA from S.P. Jain Institute of Management and Research. In 2011, he was conferred The Young Education Leader Award by EDGE Forum – a forum of leading educationists and educational institutions in India.
Grovo is a New York City-based technology company that provides a SaaS learning platform to improve and advance employee and organizational performance.
CloudHealth Technologies, now CloudHealth by VMware, is a privately held software company based in Boston, Massachusetts. The company provides cloud computing services related to cost management, governance, automation, security, and performance.
Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator is an American seed accelerator launched in January 2011.
