InBloom
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
inBloom was a nonprofit education-technology company founded in 2011 as the Shared Learning Collaborative and launched publicly in February 2013. Backed by $100 million in grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, it built a cloud-based data infrastructure designed to aggregate student information from school districts so educators could personalize instruction. Nine states signed on as partners, with more than 2.7 million students expected in the system.
02 / InBloom FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
The company was undone by a nationwide backlash over student-data privacy. Parents and advocacy groups protested the collection of up to 400 data points per student, including names, addresses, test scores, disciplinary records and in some cases Social Security numbers, with no credible guarantees of security or protection from sharing with third-party vendors. States and districts withdrew one by one after the outcry; the tipping point came when the New York State legislature voted in March 2014 to bar participation and ordered already-stored data deleted. With its last partner gone, inBloom announced its shutdown in April 2014, CEO Iwan Streichenberger blaming mischaracterization and misdirected criticism.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Operations ended
Gates/Carnegie-funded nonprofit inBloom announced it planned to shut its doors and wind down over coming months after partner withdrawals and NY legislation. EdWeek same day quotes CEO Iwan Streichenberger wind-down email.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
The venture consumed its $100 million in foundation grants to build and operate the student-data platform, which never reached a paying-customer phase.
- 02
With all nine partner states withdrawn by spring 2014, the organization lost its entire user base and revenue path.
- 03
In April 2014 the company ceased operations and wound down; the grant funds were spent on the failed build-out with no assets returned to funders.