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Francisco Partners Makes Growth Investment in Civitas Learning

Press Releases — Feb 20, 2019

Status

Current

Deal Facts

North America

Private Buy Out

AUSTIN, TEX. — Civitas Learning today announced a significant growth investment from Francisco Partners, alongside current education and impact investors including Rethink Education, SJF Ventures, and Lumina Foundation. The Austin-based company pioneered the use of advanced data science, design thinking, and machine learning to inform initiatives and improve student outcomes.

More than 350 colleges or universities worldwide now use Civitas Learning’s popular cloud-based platform and Student Success Suite to engage and nudge students, guide course planning and class scheduling, and support case management by advisors and faculty. By integrating data from historically disparate sources, institutions can also use the platform to measure the impact of the wide array of student success initiatives across their institutions.

“In the seven years since we launched with our first cohort of partners, the application of advanced analytics for student success has undergone a dramatic evolution, and is now making a profound impact on institutional policy, practice, and student outcomes,” said Charles Thornburgh, Co-Founder of Civitas Learning. “This investment enables our team to continue delivering on the promise of personalized and actionable intelligence for colleges and universities, while supporting the integration required to streamline and deploy our solutions quickly, seamlessly, and at scale.”

One of the nation’s most active growth investors in education technology, Francisco Partners previously led investments in several leading education software companies, including Discovery Education, a leading provider of digital content to K-12 education, and Renaissance, whose popular curriculum and tools are now used in more than one-third of U.S. schools.

“Civitas Learning pioneered the application of data science and machine learning in education in ways that have already changed the trajectory for tens of thousands of students,” said Jonathan Murphy at Francisco Partners. “They are positioned to significantly increase their educational and social impact, and we are excited about partnering with the team to accelerate the company to new levels of growth and impact across higher education.”

About Francisco Partners

Francisco Partners is an investment firm that specializes in technology and technology-enabled services businesses. Since its launch over 19 years ago, Francisco Partners has raised over $14 billion in committed capital and invested in more than 200 technology companies, making it one of the most active and longstanding investors in the technology industry. The firm invests in opportunities where its deep sectoral knowledge and operational expertise can help companies realize their full potential. For more information, please visit www.franciscopartners.com.

About Civitas Learning

Civitas Learning is a student success intelligence platform leveraging each institution’s unique data to find and distribute the clearest path to improved higher education outcomes. We do this through our leading-edge technology, design thinking, and data science to achieve our goal to help a million more students. Today, Civitas Learning is a strategic partner to more than 350 colleges and universities, serving nearly 8 million students. Together with our growing community of partners, Civitas Learning is making the most of the world’s learning data to graduate a million more students per year by 2025. For more information, please visit www.civitaslearning.com.

ABOUT CIVITAS LEARNING
Civitas Learning provides colleges and universities with insights and workflow tools that help improve student retention and decrease dropout rates. Its analytics solutions synthesize numerous data sources to predict which students are at the highest risk of leaving school.