Smarterer

Smarterer, founded in Boston in 2010, developed a platform for assessing digital, social, and technical skills. The company was established by a team of serial entrepreneurs: Dave Balter, Jennifer Fremont-Smith, and Michael Kowalchik. The founding idea originated from Balter's experience hiring for an analytics role, where he realized the difficulty in gauging a candidate's true capabilities without deep domain knowledge himself. This highlighted a market need for a reliable method to quantify professional skills.

The founders brought diverse and relevant experience to the venture. Dave Balter, who served as CEO, had previously founded the successful word-of-mouth marketing firm BzzAgent. Jennifer Fremont-Smith, the company's initial CEO, had a background founding multiple startups, including a CRM provider and a candidate skills assessment firm, and held an MBA from MIT Sloan. Michael Kowalchik, the CTO, was an engineer with a history in web technology, distributed computing, and data analytics, having previously co-founded Grazr Corp and worked at EMC.

Smarterer's core product was a proprietary assessment engine that could validate a user's skill level in as few as 10 questions and 120 seconds. The platform utilized crowdsourcing to develop and maintain its tests; users and experts could author, provide feedback on, and collaboratively refine questions, ensuring the assessments remained current with evolving industry demands. Upon completion, users received a score and a shareable digital badge to showcase on professional profiles like LinkedIn. This model served both individuals seeking to prove their abilities and enterprise clients. For businesses, Smarterer offered a product called Flock, an enterprise-specific platform for hiring, internal evaluations, and training.

The company's business model focused on providing these assessment services to individuals, talent platforms, and Fortune 500 companies. After its founding, Smarterer secured a total of $4.6 million in funding from investors including True Ventures, Google Ventures, Boston Seed Capital, and Rethink Capital Partners. The platform demonstrated significant traction, with its community answering over 56 million questions across 1.7 million test sessions by late 2014. This growth culminated in November 2014, when Pluralsight, a leader in online professional learning, acquired Smarterer for $75 million. The acquisition was intended to integrate Smarterer's dynamic assessment technology with Pluralsight's extensive course library, creating data-driven, personalized learning paths for users.

Keywords: skills assessment, crowdsourced testing, professional development, talent evaluation, employee screening, skill validation, edtech, human resources technology, corporate training, digital badges, pre-hire testing, skill gap analysis, workforce development, Pluralsight, Dave Balter, Jennifer Fremont-Smith, Michael Kowalchik, online assessment, competency testing, recruitment technology