BrightBytes raises $33M to help schools everywhere gauge the impact of technology in classrooms

BrightBytes, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) data-analytics company that measures the impact of technology in K-12 education, has raised $33 million as part of a series C financing.

The San Francisco-based company had raised $18.5 million since its inception in 2012, so today’s news takes its total funding past the $50 million mark. The round was led by Insight Venture Partners, a VC and private equity firm based in New York, with contributions from Bessemer Venture Partners, Learn Capital, and Rethink Education.

Armed with a team of data scientists, developers, and researchers, BrightBytes targets those at the helm of educational institutions and school districts, offering tools to help them make sense of their data and look at how investment in technology is directly influencing outcomes in the class.

BrightBytes creates “evidence-based frameworks” and combines them with data provided by a school or set of schools from a region. In short, BrightBytes is all about telling those who make the purchasing decisions how they should be spending money on technology.

The company’s flagship Clarity platform can help tackle problems such as student dropout rates and technology efficacy, and BrightBytes claims one in five schools in the U.S. already use Clarity.

With $33 million extra in its coffers, BrightBytes says it will push to grow its international customer base, and build its engineering and customer support teams.

“We see a large global market using data analytics to improve education, and the BrightBytes team is building a category-defining company,” said Nick Sinai, partner at Insight Venture Partners, who also joins BrightBytes’ board of directors.

So-called “edtech” companies have increasingly been attracting VC funding in recent years — funding grew by more than 50 percent to almost $2 billion in 2014.

Indeed, in February last year Google Capital plowed $40 million into online education giant Renaissance Learning, while LinkedIn made its biggest acquisition to date a few months back with the $1.5 billion purchase of Lynda.com, a subscription-based service that helps people learn new skills.