After yesterday’s “sources say” report from TechCrunch about Instructure – maker of the Canvas LMS – raising a new round of financing and entering the corporate LMS space, Instructure changed plans and made their official announcement to today. The funding is to both expand the Canvas team and to establish the new corporate LMS team. I’m not a fan of media attempts to get a scoop based purely on rumors, and in this case TechCrunch got a few items wrong that are worth correcting.
- Instructure raised $40 million in new financing (series E), not “between $50 to $70 million”. TechCrunch did hedge their bets with “low end of the range at over $40 million”.
- The primary competition in the corporate LMS space is Saba, SumTotal, Skillsoft, Cornerstone – and not Blackboard.
- The Canvas LMS was launched in 2010, not 2011. (OK, I’ll give them this one, as even Instructure seems to use the 2011 date).
TechCrunch did get the overall story of fund-raising and new corporate product right, but these details matter.
Instructure’s new product for the corporate learning market is called Bridge, with its web site here. This is an entirely new product, although it does share a similar product architecture as Canvas, the LMS designed for the education market (including being based on Ruby on Rails). Unlike Canvas, Bridge was designed mobile-first, with all mobile capabilities embedded in the product and not as separate applications. In an interview with Josh Coates, CEO of Instructure, he described their motivation for this new product.
We like the idea of building software that helps people get smarter. Post education there is a void, with bad corporate software.