Finetune, a Boston-based educational technology company with Maine roots and Maine investors, has been acquired for an undisclosed sum by a Baltimore-based company.
Founded as Academic Merit in 2004 by Ogden Morse, an English teacher at Falmouth High School who developed a product to help other teachers with professional development, Finetune evolved over the years into an leading innovator in the use of artificial intelligence in education and workforce-readiness software tools. Its customers include The College Board, which administers the SATs.
While the company was founded in Maine, it moved to Boston six years ago after hiring Steven Shapiro as its CEO. It maintained a Maine presence for a few years before going fully remote.
“We became a remote company in 2017 and never turned back, so we were uninterrupted when the pandemic hit. We now have 60 folks on our team from 12 different U.S. states and 14 different countries,” Shapiro tells Maine Startups Insider. Unfortunately, it no longer maintains much of a presence in Maine, he adds.
Finetune invented two new AI-enabled products, Generate and Catalog, more than two years ago.
“It was a perfect storm of seeing the large problems to solve in the education and training world and using a new, emerging technology that allowed us to build the solution to solve the problems,” Shapiro said. “Problem: the world is changing so quickly and the content necessary to keep up needs constant refreshing. Our tools bring coherence and understanding to content creation and classification, allowing human subject matter experts to more quickly adjust and keep up with the changing learning landscape.”
Maine Startups Insider last reported on the company in 2017, when it was still known as Academic Merit, after it raised a $600,000 follow-on seed round.
Investors in Finetune include Maine Venture Fund and members of the Maine Angels. At the time of the 2017 raise, Maine Venture Fund’s then-managing director, John Burns, said the quasi-state fund had invested a total of $350,000 in the company over two rounds.
“Finetune is a great example of the type of success we work towards with each one of our portfolio companies,” Dr. Brien Walton, board chair of Maine Venture Fund, said in a statement. “MVF first invested in Finetune in 2015, and as a result of this positive return of capital, we’ll be able to recycle these funds into many more investments in other Maine-based companies.”
Shapiro said he was “grateful for the early foundational support from the Maine startup ecosystem, including Maine Venture Fund and several Maine-based individual investors.”
“This next phase of growth with Prometric allows us to further build on our success, taking these solutions to market at scale and continuing to invest in emerging technologies that address the needs of the wide cross section of markets we serve.”
