Edmodo

Edmodo is an educational technology company offering a communication, collaboration, and coaching platform to K-12 schools and teachers. The Edmodo network enables teachers to share content, distribute quizzes, assignments, and manage communication with students, colleagues, and parents. Edmodo is very teacher-centric in their design and philosophy: students and parents can only join Edmodo if invited to do so by a teacher. Teachers and students spend large amounts of time on the platform, both in and out of the classroom. Edmodo is free to use, but it also offers premium services.
History.
Edmodo was founded by Nick Borg, Jeff O'Hara, and Crystal Hutter in 2008. It is backed by Index Ventures, Benchmark, Greylock Partners, Learn Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Union Square Ventures, Glynn Capital Management, Tenaya Capital, SingTel Innov8, and KDDI. As of July 2019 Edmodo claimed to have over 100M users worldwide.
About half of these users were in the US, with the rest being in 180 countries around the world. Significant concentrations exist in Singapore, Indonesia, Uruguay and Italy. About 10% of these users were teachers, an illustration of how popular Edmodo is in classrooms.
In 2013, Edmodo was included in the list of "The Top Apps for teachers" by "PC Magazine". That same year, Edmodo acquired a startup, Root-1, in an attempt to become the app store for education. Vibhu Mittal, Co-founder and CEO of Root-1, became the CEO of Edmodo the following year.
In 2014, Edmodo launched Snapshot – a suite of assessment tools to measure student progress on educational standards. Edtech digest awarded Edmodo Snapshot the Cool Tool Award for Best Assessment Solution. The company has partnered with two major publishers in United Kingdom, Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press to provide access to educational content on the Edmodo Platform and bring Edmodo Snapshot to the UK.
In March 2015, Noodle named Edmodo as one of “The 32 Most Innovative Online Educational Tools". In January 2017, Edmodo launched professional development (PD) courses for teachers in the state of New York in conjunction with NYPTI. These included both a synchronous video classroom component as well as an asynchronous, text based discussion component and have been used by thousands of teachers. In June 2017, Frost and Sullivan announced that Edmodo had won the Customer Value Leadership Award.
On May 17, 2017, Edmodo sent an email informing users that it was the victim of a major hack of user information. Some 77 million users' data were breached: this included the username, hashed password and email address (in a subset of the cases, since not all users need an email address to register). Since passwords were both hashed and salted (encrypted) using the bcrypt algorithm the effort to decrypt all the passwords would have been very large. There were no reports of any school data being affected, nor any identities compromised, according to an external audit commissioned by the company.
In June 2017, Edmodo announced Ask Mo, an educational video search engine, as an illustration of the benefits of machine learning on educational data sets: the search is based on videos that had been shared by teachers in the context of educational discussions and can be filtered by subject and grade level.
On April 8, 2018, Edmodo announced that it was being acquired by NetDragon for $137.5M in cash and stock.