EDTECH: YEAR OF ACQUISITIONS BOLSTERS PLATFORM CAPABILITIES
As students head back to school this year to in-person classrooms, the online tools adopted by teachers and districts during the remote learning days of the pandemic have remained as a now integrated part of a student’s learning experience.
To make that experience safer, San Diego-based Linewize, a division of Australia-based Family Zone, has spent the last year building a powerful edtech platform to fulfill its mission of “protecting a child’s digital journey at school and at home,” said Ross Young, executive vice president of Linewize.
The company fulfills its mission by providing digital compliance tools to block pornography and other unwanted content on school issued devices; and giving teachers tools that help enable online learning.
“If you think about a child getting a laptop, and trying to focus on one particular thing, you’re giving them access to every distraction in the world. So we help districts provide tools for teachers to keep them focused,” Young said.
The Linewize platform and protects students from cyber bullying and looks for early indicators of depression, suicide and school violence.
“We’re intervening in those types of events daily – multiple daily. There’s a really large problem out there,” Young said, adding that he sees the Linewize platform as “tech for good.”
To date, the tech-for-good platform is utilized worldwide by 12 million students in 24,000 schools – with 38% of schools in the United Kingdom and 16% of U.S. school districts already adopting the platform.
Young said a lot of the growth in the edtech space over the past few years was a direct result of the pandemic, which forced most schools to shut down in-person learning.
“The pandemic was a catalyst for every district in the country to purchase a device for every single child,” he said. “And teachers needed to be able to control those devices and help students.”
Even with students returning to their classrooms, school districts are continuing to adopt technology at a rapid rate to also prepare students for the modern workforce, which is also becoming more online. Also, the pandemic showed schools that cloud-based edtech services are in many cases more effective and easier to deploy than textbooks.
“And most districts in the country have added an online school,” Young said. “So that is going to continue to remain.”
Last year, Linewize through Family Zone began a series of acquisitions of complimentary edtech companies to bolster its platform starting with the acquisition of Virginia-based NetRef.
NetRef provides a classroom management platform that offers teachers screen visibility and the ability to control devices in the class. Young said the company was one of fastest growing startups in edtech and fit in well with Linewize from a culture and technology perspective.
“It really enhanced our classroom management suite and, frankly, they’re a best of breed solution that we integrated,” he said.
In September 2021, Linewize acquired U.K-based education technology company Smoothwall for $146 million.
“It instantly made us the market share leader in the U.K. and then they had some additional technology around protecting students that we’ve modified and integrated with our current systems to protect children in a better way,” Young said.
Family Zone continued the buying spree for Linewize in March of this year with the acquisition of Cipafilter in a cash and stock purchase worth $7.5 million.
“Cipafilter is one of the oldest content filtering companies around,” Young said.
Cipafilter was named after the Children’s Internet Safety Act (CIPA) and Young said the acquisition of such an established company offered Linewize a very loyal customer base and a beneficial talent pool of engineers with decades of experience in content filtering.
“We are honored to be welcomed into Linewize’s rapidly growing group,” said Andrew Derbyshire, the former chief operating officer of Cipafilter who now serves as Linewize’s director of operations. “Having built an effective web filter and more, we’re proud to have successfully provided schools with the level of safety that’s needed today. As we look forward to calling Linewize home, we intend to continue making an impact in the ever-changing edtech landscape.”
Family Zone’s most recent acquisition was of parental content filtering company Qustodio in May.
“Qustodio and Family Zone share the view of a better world where schools, parents and children can work together to create safe and enriching online experiences,” said Eduardo Cruz, co-founder and CEO of Qustodio. “This shared vision has led us to unite forces and bring game-changing unified approaches in online safety to the market. Our combination will represent the creation of a truly global leader in online safety with unmatched scale and capabilities.”
Young said the addition of Qustodio now allows Linewize to offer parents a way to filter their children online and empower them from a learning perspective in how their kids use the internet and what types of controls they may need to put in place.
“All those technologies really fill out our line core from a solution perspective to align with our mission – helping school districts stay compliant, protecting kids online, enabling learning and then sharing that data with the parents and making them aware and teaching them how to be better digital parents,” he added.
Although there are no announced plans for more acquisitions, Linewize is looking to areas in edtech that are ripe for growth. One area for growth is in analytics.
“Districts was visibility and assessment on are these online tools are working,” Young said. “Learning analytics is in demand here to see what our ROI is. And ROI in the edtech space is learning outcomes and graduation rates.”
Another area of growth, and one Linewize is already at the forefront of, is monitoring emotional learning and mental health online.
“The demand for that is incredibly high,” Young said and pointed out that the state of New Jersey recently passed a law saying districts have to have mental health departments to check on the wellbeing of students. “And because students are conducting their lives online these days, ultimately you can get early clues to that.”
Linewize (Family Zone)
Founded: 2014
Executive VP: Ross Young
Headquarters: Rancho Bernardo (U.S.)
Business: Edtech platform offering digital and online safety tools for parents and teachers.
Revenue: $77 million
Stock: Family Zone: FZO (ASX)
Employees: 515
Website: www.linewize.com
Notable: The Linewize platform serves over 12 million students worldwide.
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