Blackboard Inc.

Blackboard Inc. is an educational technology company with corporate headquarters in Washington, D.C.. It is known for its Blackboard Learn learning management system.

The company's CEO is William L. Ballhaus, formerly President and CEO of SRA International, who was also named Chairman and President on January 4, 2016, following the resignation of Jay Bhatt, who had led Blackboard since October 2012. just after Michael Chasen departed.The firm provides education, mobile, communication, and commerce software and related services to clients including education providers, corporations and government organizations. The software consists of seven platforms called Learn, Transact, Engage, Connect, Mobile, Collaborate and Analytics that are offered as bundled software. The firm was founded by Michael Chasen, Matthew Pittinsky, Stephen Gilfus and Daniel Cane in 1997, and became a public company in 2004. It operated publicly until it was purchased by Providence Equity Partners in 2011. As of January 2014^[update], its software and services are used by approximately 17,000 schools and organizations in 100 countries. Seventy-five percent of US colleges and universities and more than half of K–12 districts in the United States use its products and services.

Blackboard LLC. was founded in 1997 by Michael Chasen and Matthew Pittinsky and began as a consulting firm contracting to the non-profit IMS Global Learning Consortium. Chasen and Pittinsky started Blackboard after leaving KPMG Consulting where they both had worked as part of the company's higher education practice. In 1998, the company, Blackboard LLC., merged with CourseInfo LLC, a cutting edge software provider founded by Daniel Cane and Stephen Gilfus that originated at Cornell University, Gilfus wrote the business plan while an undergraduate at Cornell after founding CEO the Cornell Entrepreneur Organization. CourseInfo had developed an innovative new platform for internet and networked learning, a "Course Management System" platform they called it and had already sold 15 clients including: Cornell University, Yale Medical School, University of Pittsburgh, UCLA and several others. ("It's a Web course-management tool," explains Stephen Gilfus, CourseInfo's founder and vice president for sales and marketing. "The entire structure is set up to provide areas where you can input your own information. It supports all file types, including multimedia.") In 1998, Gilfus and Cane decided too merge CourseInfo with Chasen and Pittinky's Blackboard LLC. company in order to raise money and scale the business. The combined company turned into a corporation, as Blackboard Inc., to prepare for growth and financing, and renamed the platform (built by the Cornell team) to Blackboard's CourseInfo; until the CourseInfo brand was dropped in 2000. The product was initially sold to schools for 5-10k per year on an annual FTE licensing model (one of the 1st of its kind). During the .Com era the company also provide a hosted version for teachers to try out for free. The new company made a profit in its first year, and its sales in 1998 approached US$1 million. Other early products included Blackboard Classroom and Blackboard Campus. In 2000, Blackboard acquired iCollege/College Enterprises Inc.'s campus card, introducing commerce capability to Blackboard's portfolio.