EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY, CORPORATE LEARNING SYSTEMS
Guild Education and Salt Security | March 17, 2023
Salt Security, the leading API security company, today announced that Guild Education, the leader in opportunity creation for America's workforce, has chosen the Salt Security API Protection Platform to secure its growing application programming interface (API) ecosystem. Guild relies on APIs for the exchange of private and sensitive student, employer, and school data across its Career Opportunity Platform. With the Salt platform, Guild gains automatic and continuous API visibility, insights into potential data exposure, and API runtime protection to ensure the safety of its customers' critical data.
"Guild supports workers, companies, and educational organizations to build new career opportunities and address increasing talent shortages. Keeping employee, employer, and school data secure has always been a top priority," said Julie Chickillo, VP, head of security, Guild Education. "The visibility we get with Salt eliminates blindspots, allowing us to better protect the critical and personal information – including employer eligibility updates, student loan reimbursement data, and program applications – being shared via our APIs."
Although Guild looked at other API security solutions, Salt provided the most actionable insights and the most mature platform. Leveraging the robust Salt API security platform, Guild gains:
Discovery of shadow APIs – to ensure a complete and accurate API inventory and understand what unknown APIs might exist that could pose security risks
Attack prevention – the most proven algorithms in API security to pinpoint attacker reconnaissance activity, even drawn out over days and weeks, and stop attackers before they reach their objective
API security testing – to gain vulnerability insights in pre-production, empowering the Guild development team to improve the security posture of its new APIs
The Salt Security platform enables organizations to catalog their APIs, see where they expose sensitive data, detect and block API attackers, scan and test APIs, and provide remediation insights that developers can use to harden APIs and improve the security posture over time. Through its patented API Context Engine (ACE) architecture, the platform can identify the early indicators of an attack, stop attackers from advancing and turn attackers into penetration testers, leading to valuable feedback for security teams to identify and eliminate API vulnerabilities.
About Salt Security
Salt Security protects the APIs that form the core of every modern application. Its patented API Protection Platform is the only API security solution that combines the power of cloud-scale big data and time-tested ML/AI to detect and prevent API attacks. By correlating activities across millions of APIs and users over time, Salt delivers deep context with real-time analysis and continuous insights for API discovery, attack prevention, and shift-left practices. Deployed quickly and seamlessly integrated within existing systems, the Salt platform gives customers immediate value and protection, so they can innovate with confidence and accelerate their digital transformation initiatives. For more information, visit https://salt.security/
About Guild
Guild's Career Opportunity Platform enables forward-thinking employers to invest in their employees, unlocking life-changing opportunities for personal and professional growth through education and learning programs, career development and one-on-one coaching. Guild partners with the nation's largest employers — including Walmart, Chipotle, Discover, Hilton, Macy's, Target and The Walt Disney Company — to create cultures of opportunity that will help them attract and retain top talent, and build the workforce of the future. Using Guild's Career Opportunity Platform full of real-world education and learning programs, employees at those companies can gain the skills, knowledge and guidance they need to build a brighter future for themselves and their families — all without paying for tuition or career services on their own. For more information, visit https://www.guildeducation.com/
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TALENT DEVELOPMENT
Businesswire | June 02, 2023
Swing Education, an online marketplace that connects schools and substitute teachers, announced today $38 million in Series C funding. The funding round was led by funds advised by Apax Partners LLP (“Apax”), a leading global private equity advisory firm, and by edtech investment firm Reach Capital. The funding enables Swing Education to invest in its growth and better address the nation-wide substitute teacher shortage.
This financing follows a 2018 Series B funding co-led by GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Owl Ventures and a seed round from a consortium that included Social Capital, Kapor Capital, Moment Ventures, Ulu Ventures, Red House Education, and Edovate Capital.
Swing believes that every classroom deserves a teacher, and every student deserves to learn without disruption. Since its founding in 2015, Swing has worked to improve the experience of being a substitute teacher and made it easier for K-12 schools to grow and manage their substitute teacher pools. Swing currently works with over 2,800 school partners and in the 2022-23 school year has supported these schools in filling over one million instructional hours with substitute teachers.
Teacher vacancies are an ever-present challenge for school administrators, with 45% of public schools operating without a full teaching staff at the start of the 2022-2023 school year. While school leaders recognize the need for substitute teachers, improving processes around substitute teaching and investing in programs and tools that support substitute well-being often go unprioritized. Swing aims to fill this gap. By combining dedicated success teams and a comprehensive technology platform, Swing works to ensure that substitutes are treated better, which, in turn, attracts more individuals to the profession.
“We’re thrilled to have Apax Partners and Reach Capital as strategic investors,” said Mike Teng, CEO of Swing Education. “The need for substitute teachers is acute. This additional funding highlights the current strain on our schools and positions Swing to grow our impact, placing even more substitute teachers in even more classrooms.”
“Swing Education is a truly impactful business, bringing much needed digitalization to the substitute teacher staffing marketplace and making it easier and more efficient to match talent with schools,” said David Su, Partner, Apax Global Impact. “We’re incredibly excited to be partnering with Mike and the broader team to help grow the business and execute on our joint vision for the company.”
“Beyond broadening and diversifying staffing pools, Swing’s distinct marketplace model provides upskilling opportunities and unlocks innovative pathways to the teaching profession,” said Steve Kupfer, Venture Partner at Reach Capital. “Each of these goals aligns with our mission as education investors. We are thrilled to support the Swing team through this next stage of growth.”
"Even prior to the pandemic's amplification, the teacher shortage in the United States profoundly impacted the K-12 education system. Under the visionary leadership of Mike and Asha, Swing Education has built a transformative way for K-12 schools and substitute teachers to connect,” said Amit A. Patel, Managing Director at Owl Ventures. “Their technology platform has harnessed the power of data to enable a seamless match between teacher absences and qualified substitutes as well as ensure uninterrupted student learning."
Swing currently operates in California, Arizona, Texas, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C. and will use this latest funding round to grow its substitutes and school partners in these regions. Swing will look to expand to new regions in 2024.
About Swing Education
Swing Education is an online staffing marketplace that connects substitute teachers with schools. Founded in 2015 by former K-12 educators and administrators, Swing makes it easier for schools and districts to find reliable, qualified substitute teachers when they need them most. With over 300,000 absence days filled to date, Swing is dedicated to improving the experience of finding substitute teachers, becoming a sub, and keeping student learning on track. Swing serves over 2,800 partner schools across California, Arizona, Illinois, Texas, New Jersey, New York, and Washington D.C.
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EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY
PRnewswire | April 06, 2023
Learneo, Inc., an ambitious new platform of productivity and learning businesses and technologies, today announced its acquisition of German-founded LanguageTool, a multilingual writing platform for English, Spanish, and 30 other languages. This acquisition adds to Learneo's robust suite of writing solutions, while also advancing the company's larger international expansion strategy.
"We are committed to supporting builder-driven businesses that help people learn and do more, faster, better, and more affordably—wherever learning occurs," said Andrew Grauer, CEO of Learneo. "The LanguageTool business fits squarely in our investment thesis and accelerates our mission thanks to their values-aligned and ambitious co-founders, their broad customer reach of B2C and B2B clients across the globe, and their unique language and AI expertise."
Globally, most people communicate in more than one language today. Employers are increasingly expecting their employees to engage with colleagues, partners, and customers in multiple languages. In the U.S., for example, 9 out of 10 U.S. employers have reported that they rely on U.S.-based employees with language skills other than English.
Born out of an interest in helping professionals communicate in an increasingly global world, Daniel Naber started LanguageTool as a part of his diploma thesis while studying computational linguistics in 2003. Naber spent many years building LanguageTool in his free time, initially as an open-source project and later as a business when he joined forces with Christopher Blum. Blum had previously founded the spell checking platform, Spellboy, and the two decided to collaborate and unify their experience by co-founding LanguageTool as a business. Today, LanguageTool boasts over 60,000 paying subscribers, including professionals and enterprise clients, and millions more free users across Europe and Latin America.
"Having built LanguageTool over the course of the last 20 years, it has been exciting for us to find a partner so clearly aligned with our mission who also understands our advanced technology and can support our continued innovation in a moment of rapid technological evolution," said Naber. "Joining the Learneo team and having the ability to work alongside talent with phenomenal writing and AI expertise to accelerate our vision is a dream come true. We are deeply motivated by the possibilities that lie ahead!"
With this acquisition, Learneo now comprises seven distinct business lines: CliffsNotes, Course Hero, LanguageTool, LitCharts, QuillBot, Scribbr, and Symbolab. Individually, and together, Learneo's platform of businesses is pioneering advances in a wide range of applications for emergent technologies, including the use of AI to improve people's written communications, reading, and math skills, whether they are in school, a professional work environment, or simply navigating everyday life. Most recently, QuillBot announced the addition of an AI-augmented translator to its platform, allowing users to translate complex texts and better understand the nuances of sentence structure, word choice, and verb conjugation.
"In an ever-more-globalized, asynchronous work environment, accessible multilingual expertise for written communication is in high demand," said Rohan Gupta, CEO of QuillBot and head of Learneo's writing vertical. "Daniel, Christopher and the LanguageTool team have built something truly unique, and I am excited for us to build together, to evolve each of our product lines across Learneo's writing vertical, and to advance the international writing industry at large."
About Learneo
Learneo is pioneering a platform of productivity and learning businesses. The platform of businesses includes CliffsNotes, the original and iconic study guide company; Course Hero, an online learning platform of academic resources; LitCharts, a creator of literature resources; QuillBot, an AI-powered writing companion; Scribbr, a multilingual academic proofreading service, and Symbolab, an AI-based mathematics resource.
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