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Austin EdTech developer Civitas Learning announced a $60 million funding round this week led by Warburg Pincus, a global private equity firm based in New York City.
The investment will help Civitas expand into new markets through mergers and acquisitions and further develop their predictive data analytics software, which allows educators to help struggling students with early intervention. The company’s expanding platform can be used to build institution-specific predictive models for educators to track not just student performance, but intake, persistence and graduation.
Founder and CEO Charles Thornburgh said the investment will allow Civitas to grow beyond just making apps for schools because their analytics system is intended to power apps developed by other companies and even by member colleges.
“We intend to help fuel an ecosystem of educational innovation,” Thornburgh said in a statement. “With this investment, we’re going to be able to improve and accelerate both learning and student outcomes for our partner institutions.”
Co-founder and Chief Learning Officer Dr. Mark Milliron said the vote of confidence from investors will enable Civitas to do some of its most important work yet.
"With great funding comes great responsibility,” he said. “Now it's up to us to work with our partners to help more students on their educational journeys."
It won’t be the first time Civitas aims high to help students. As we’ve previously reported, Civitas is active in Austin nonprofits, raising money for the Center for Child Protection in recent years and hosting classes about education and technology for Big Brothers Big Sisters at their new offices.
This is the first investment in Austin tech for Warburg Pincus, which manages $35 billion in assets and a portfolio of 120 companies spanning a variety of industries and international markets. The firm’s other tech and media investments include GrubHub and Seamless.
The funding round also includes Emergence Capital Partners, Austin Ventures, Rethink Education, SJF Ventures and Gera Venture Capital.
