Declara launched in 2012 to considerable funding and fanfare—including a shoutout from former President Barack Obama. But its AI-powered social learning platform struggled to find a footing in the market, and never quite lived up to expectations.
Over the years the company has changed considerably—and caught the attention of a European buyer. Futuryng, an Italian blockchain IoT company that helps companies connect data systems, has acquired Declara. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
It’s an unusual buyer for an education technology startup. According to Nelson Gonzalez, Declara’s co-founder, the buyer was drawn primarily to Declara’s machine learning technologies, which it plans to roll into its software.
But Declara is not going away, and will remain operating as an independent subsidiary. Gonzalez assures that Declara’s educational offerings and clients will be supported. “We’ll continue to serve educators all over the world, and foster better enterprise learning and development.”
Based in Palo Alto, Calif., Declara’s rapid rise to fame fed into some familiar Silicon Valley startup tropes. There was a harrowing comeback story, featuring its co-founder and first CEO Ramona Pierson, who suffered a near fatal accident caused by a drunk driver. As she recovered, she continued her work in applying neuroscience research and artificial intelligence technology in education. Before starting Declara, she had already started and sold one edtech company, SynpaticMash.
There was also a litany of terms in the company’s pitch that could read like a list of buzzwords, as Declara claimed to mash up machine learning, artificial intelligence, semantic analysis and neural networks together into an “intelligent social learning platform.”
Declara has two core components: a “cognitive graph” that can analyze behaviors and patterns in how users on its platform access and share content, and interact with one another. This data is then used to create learner profiles for each user.
The second is Declara’s ability to ingest, index and tag digital materials that its customers want on their platform. (It can also do this for openly-licensed content publicly available online.) Based on users’ learning profiles, Declara claims it can predict and automatically recommend the right content and connections tailored for each individual.
Among Declara’s earliest clients were education departments and ministries that used it for teachers’ professional development. Its first customer was Australia, which contracted with Declara to build a platform to help its teachers implement a new national curriculum. That was followed by similar large-scale deployments to support teachers’ professional learning in Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Puerto Rico. For California’s department of education, Declara built a social network to help teachers share professional learning resources.
Declara also white-labeled and sold its platform to companies, including 3M, Genentech and Renault, which used the platform for employee training. The majority of these deals were pre-paid, multi-year contracts involving seven and eight figures, according to Gonzalez.
Big Capital, Bigger Expectations
Those early successes attracted an influx of capital. Declara raised $5 million in seed funding in 2013, quickly followed by a Series A that stretched multiple closings. In total, the company has raised $38 million. Its investors include GSV Capital, Catamount Ventures, Founders Fund, Data Collective, Susa Ventures, Peter Thiel and Singapore-based EDBI.
But the rapid influx of money also came with “massive expectations” from investors for scaling the business that the company did not live up to, according to Gonzalez. Despite the company’s early success inking deals with big clients, they did not translate to repeatable sales. Those deals were largely driven by the relationships that he and Pierson had. “We expected our salespeople to do some magic to replicate the early deals. But that’s not realistic…[since] they were largely founder-driven,” he adds. (Pierson fell ill with a medical complication that forced her to leave Declara in 2017. She later took up a post at Amazon.)
The company struggled to understand who its target customers should be, and what pain points Declara was trying to help solve. Across its education and corporate clients, the use cases were different enough that it was difficult for the company to identify its target market or develop customer personas. As a result, Declara was “a solution in search of a problem,” says Gonzalez.
“The cognitive graph [that the company built] is a powerful tool to understanding human behavior,” he says. “But for what? By itself, it’s a solution to an unspecified problem, and that makes it tough to scale.”
As a result, the team found itself proactively seeking customers to find use cases for the Declara product—not the other way around. “The definition of product-market fit is when the product is selling itself. Post Series A, the product needs to sell itself. You shouldn’t need the founders to do it.”
Declara tinkered with plans to develop a version of the platform to sell directly to consumers. It also thought about pivoting to focus exclusively on the corporate learning market. Closing shop was another option on the table.
“We were trying to be all things to all people,” recalls Zak Zielezinski, who took over as Declara’s CEO after Pierson left. He was previously the company’s vice president of business development.
What did scale was the company’s headcount, which at its largest ballooned past 120 full-time employees with satellite offices in Mexico and Singapore.
Toward the end of 2014, the company decided to pivot from its original product. It laid off its entire sales team, and spent nine months to build a new version, according to Zielezinski. That effort laid the foundation for the current product, which removed courses and assessment features in favor of a simpler user experience focused around resource sharing and collaboration.
With a slimmer offering and team, the company began to attract more customers and eventually achieved profitability in late 2017, Zielezinski claims. Currently Declara has under 25 employees, and 15 active clients across the education, nonprofit and corporate sectors. Recent additions include The Campaign for Grade Level Reading and National Collaborative for Digital Equity. It has worked with 35 customers across its history.
Despite its early difficulties, the company began fielding inbound interest from acquirers starting in 2016. Those conversations ultimately led to Futuryng, which is retaining all of Declara’s current staff.
“Joining forces with them opens up a lot more business opportunities, geographically and by market sector,” says Zielezinski. “And it lets us leverage Futuryng’s sales force.” Futuryng boasts hundreds of customers in industries including manufacturing, telecommunications and pharmaceutical—some of whom he sees as prospective Declara users in the future.
Gonzalez, who is no longer involved in the company’s day-to-day operations, says he’s been humbled by the journey as a hot-shot, overcapitalized startup that struggled to find its footing. “Forty million dollars is a lot of money to have before you have product-market fit, and when you have a mandate from investors to scale.” He’s now imparting these lessons learned through a course he’s leading at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education.
