Spectrum Equity Announces the Sale of ExamSoft to Turnitin

Spectrum Equity is pleased to announce the sale of ExamSoft, a leader in secure software-based assessment and analytics, to Turnitin. By joining forces, Turnitin and ExamSoft become the leading technology platform focused on ensuring academic integrity while supporting improved academic outcomes across every stage of a student’s academic journey.

Spectrum originally acquired ExamSoft in 2014. Our product thesis was simple and straight forward: far too much assessment across global post-secondary / higher education and secondary education persisted offline, largely on static bubble sheets and in handwritten answer books. This had to change for obvious reasons: cheating continued to be too easy; the assessment process was fundamentally inefficient for faculty and administrators; and performance data was too difficult to accurately capture and analyze. We believed ExamSoft had developed a product set with a value proposition addressing each of these issues and supported by a highly engaged and retentive customer base. In our view, the market was going to move their way over time. But the company was relatively undermanaged at the time of our initial investment and would require significant incremental resources to capitalize on the coming opportunity.

Over the course of our ownership, Spectrum helped recruit several key executives into ExamSoft including Sebastian Vos as CEO, Britt Nichols as CRO and Mike Mitrione as CTO, and grew revenue and profit more than fivefold. With Spectrum’s support, this senior team broadened the company’s product portfolio and established category leadership in several end-market verticals. These product efforts were bolstered by transforming the company’s go-to-market efforts which catalyzed accelerated growth and expansion of the addressable market opportunity. Most recently, ExamSoft launched its Exam ID & Monitor product suite to compliment the core assessment platform. This combination offered the market the only highly secure assessment software with fully integrated online remote proctoring and exam taker identification functionality during the COVID-19 pandemic. These product features enabled ExamSoft to provide critical technology to its customers, helping them adapt and continue to provide online assessments globally. In 2020, ExamSoft will deliver more than 17 million assessment questions and collect over 500 million student responses, in 25 countries, on behalf of its customers.

ExamSoft represents another successful investment from Spectrum’s education technology portfolio. Notable prior exits include the sale of Lynda.com to LinkedIn and the sale of Finalsite to Bridge Growth Partners. We believe technology continues to transform all aspects of education and global learning and are particularly excited by the recent acceleration of this long-term trend.

We continue to devote significant energy and resources to identify additional compelling opportunities across this category that meet our investment criteria.

Below is the official press release for the transaction.