Nearpod

Nearpod

Renaissance started when educator Judi Paul created Accelerated Reader to motivate her children to read over summer. She and her husband Terry formed Advantage Learning Systems in 1986, operating from their basement. The company, now Renaissance, has grown through acquisitions into a global pre-K–12 education technology provider. Nearpod, acquired in 2021, is Renaissance’s interactive instructional delivery platform. It lets teachers deliver lessons with formative assessments, real-time insights, and standards-aligned content from a library of 22,000+ resources. The platform includes AI tools to generate lessons and multiple-choice questions. Nearpod operates alongside Renaissance’s other products — Star assessments, myON, Freckle, Lalilo, and GL Education — covering assessment, practice, and instruction. Renaissance products are used in over 100 countries across six continents. Renaissance employs over 1,200 people globally across offices in the United States, Canada, China, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Its software reaches more than 40% of US schools and draws on over 2.8 billion real-world data points about student learning. The 2023 acquisition of GL Education expanded Renaissance’s reach in the UK, Ireland, and beyond. Renaissance’s structural differentiator is its data moat: the company’s assessment and practice products generate billions of student-level data points that feed into product development and instructional recommendations across its suite. Nearpod connects with the broader Renaissance ecosystem, receiving instructional recommendations based on assessment data from Star products.