1/19/2024 0 Comments Illuminate education headquarters![]() ![]() ![]() “The first I like to look at is product fit/product gap. We really looked at product fit with our own portfolio, customer fit and customer gap,” he says. “A lot of companies make acquisitions just to bolt on revenue. The terms “could be a mix of equity, earn-outs over the years, things which might make more sense even though you might be a small company.”īefore founding DataCation, Bencivenga worked for 16 years as an educator, and he doesn’t believe companies should make acquisitions solely to chase additional revenue. There are creative ways you can do M&A as a small company that don’t require a lot of cash up front,” he says. Bencivenga advises entrepreneurs to think outside the box on how to finance acquisitions. You don’t need to be a large company like Illuminate to buy others, though. Bencivenga left the company months later, opting to lead a seed round in an early stage startup, CareMonkey, and become its president. Then, in July 2018, Illuminate Education bought IO Education as part of a five-way merger. There, Bencivenga helped orchestrate IO’s purchases of assessment platform Eadms in August 2016, and of eSchoolData, a student data management system, in September 2017. In September 2015, the private equity firm LLR Partners acquired Bencivenga’s company and merged it with another, Longleaf Solutions, to form IO Education, where Bencivenga served as the chief academic officer. CaseNEX DataCation bought Pals, a reading assessment platform, in 2012. His second acquisition was already in the works when he completed the first. From an edtech standpoint, start your M&A pipeline early on.” “We were doing $3.5 million when we made our first acquisition. “You don’t have to be doing $20 million, $30 million in revenue to start doing acquisitions,” he tells EdSurge. Bencivenga, who will be coaching entrepreneurs on acquisitions at EdSurge Immersion NYC in September, founded DataCation (later named CaseNEX DataCation) in 2007, and made his first acquisition in 2011, buying the assessment business DataDriven Classroom. He’s been involved in six edtech acquisitions over the past seven years, on both sides of the table. When it comes to getting acquisition advice, whether purchasing or selling, look no further than Bencivenga. Retention, he says, is “the one thing that could always go haywire in an acquisition.” For him, companies need to clear the bar of 90 percent customer retention in order to be suitable acquisition candidates. That number refers to customer retention rate, and Bencivenga said he’s called off potential acquisitions when a company’s performance in this department isn’t up to snuff. When deciding whether a company is viable to be bought, CareMonkey president Peter Bencivenga says the magic number is 90 percent. As with all scientific research, there is also a risk of publication bias.The Magic Number for Any Successful Education Technology Acquisition These results are promising, but more research is needed to determine the connection between improved assessment scores and everyday tasks in participants' lives.įuture research should address the risk of inadvertent experimenter bias and the risk of attrition bias in this study, as both the Lumosity and crossword groups had approximately 50% attrition rate. In it, half of the 4,715 participants who completed the study trained five days per week, for fifteen minutes each day on Lumosity while the other half did online crossword puzzles as an active control.Īfter 10 weeks, Lumosity users improved more than the control group on our assessments of working memory, short term memory, processing speed, problem solving, fluid reasoning, and overall cognitive function. ![]() Lumos Labs conducted a randomized study of Lumosity brain training and published the results in a peer-reviewed research journal. ![]()
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