Full Measure Education, a D.C. ed-tech startup from one of Blackboard's original employees, has raised $10 million to further boost the growth it's seen through the pandemic as more universities leaned harder on online services.
With the new funding round, led by Atlanta growth equity firm Fulcrum Equity Partners, the company said it will expand both its headcount and footprint, even as it broadens its online platform to help students navigate some of the college experience from their phones. The tech, which uses augmented reality, social media, mobile messaging and other tailored content, will soon go beyond its current offerings focused on initial steps, such as notifying students of college admissions or personalizing self-guided campus tours, said CEO and founder Greg Davies in an interview.
Now, Full Measure Education hopes to “start helping manage that student life cycle deeper into the student experience, through to completion,” Davies said, including handling move-in logistics and sharing information about clubs and organizations catered to the student’s interests, for instance.
The 40-person company is now hiring for its executive, customer relations, product and engineering teams, intending to double that number by year’s end and then surpass the 100-employee mark next year, Davies said.
To accommodate that growth, he said Full Measure is stretching its current headquarters at Douglas Development Corp.'s historic Uline Arena at 1140 Third St. NE in NoMa to 13,000 square feet, more than double its existing space there.
It saw some pivotal growth in the past year, as its software-as-a-service platform was increasingly licensed by more than 450 colleges and universities during the pandemic alone. The business doubled revenue last year and has already doubled revenue again so far this year, now on pace to triple it, Davies said, declining to disclose specifics.
While Full Measure's growth precedes the age of Covid-19 — it added about 100 institutions in the nine months prior to the pandemic — the lockdown highlighted challenges facing lower-income students who lacked access to online resources but do rely on their smartphones. It was a bit of a wake-up call for universities that had previously largely employed in-person visits, direct mail, email or phone calls, Davies said.
“Institutions that hadn’t gotten to that point of realizing the mobile imperative certainly realized it when all of their students went home and didn’t have physical access to the food pantry, mental health counseling, all of those critical services that became very important to students during the pandemic and were harder to access, not easier,” he said. “So I think that spurred a lot of our growth.”
Davies started Full Measure Education years into his own journey in the ed-tech sector. As one of its first five hires, he was part of the founding management team at Blackboard Inc. in 1997, before starting a Reston firm that supported college call centers, Presidium Inc., in 2003 — and selling that company to Blackboard in 2011 for $53 million. It's through that startup that he learned the challenges of the college enrollment and experience for many students, spurring him to launch Full Measure in D.C. in 2014.
Before this latest round, the company had raised $3.5 million after relaunching its platform in 2018, Davies said. The company had also raised multiple rounds in its earlier years, totaling $18.87 million in funding since its birth, per PitchBook, a venture data firm.
When starting up the company, Davies had originally conceived it as a way to use data already in campus systems to communicate more proactively with students, thereby boosting college retention rates. But the model was taking too long to implement with the schools, so the startup pivoted to instead focus on one piece of data or experience at a time.
“What we realized after a few years of that was it was a very big package that we were trying to put in place,” Davies said. After the relaunch, “it took about a year to get real traction, and the last two years, it’s just been phenomenal growth.”
