The following article was originally published by Clay & Milk on November 25, 2020.
Iowa City-based company Pear Deck announced last week that it has been acquired by GoGuardian, an education technology company based in Los Angeles, California.
Pear Deck was co-founded in 2015 by Riley Eynon-Lynch and Michal Eynon-Lynch to help teachers plan and build interactive lessons directly from Google Drive that promote active learning in the classroom.
“They [GoGuardian] are attacking the same problem that we were attacking at Pear Deck but from a completely different angle,” said Riley in a video announcing the merger. “So I’m really excited now that we’re joining forces and working on the same problem together.”
This is Riley and Michal’s second company to be acquired. Prior to Pear Deck, the two founded ActiveGrade, a company that helped educators better track student development. That company was acquired by Haiku Learning in January of 2013.
“We are excited to partner with Pear Deck to expand our reach and invigorate classrooms across the country with innovative tools that meet the evolving needs of today’s educators and students,” said GoGuardian co-founder and CEO Advait Shinde in a statement. “Our two companies’ missions are incredibly well-aligned and our products and teams are highly complementary. We’ve observed numerous cases where schools are using our GoGuardian Teacher product in conjunction with Pear Deck to deliver instruction and create environments where students flourish. Together, our teams have the expertise and resources to build next-generation technologies that will transform digital learning environments.”
As part of the deal, Michal Eynon-Lynch will join the GoGuardian Board of Directors. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.