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§ Private Profile · Boston
Smarterer is a technology company.
Smarterer has raised $7.8M across 5 funding rounds.
Key people at Smarterer.
Smarterer has raised $7.8M in total across 5 funding rounds.
Smarterer develops a skills assessment platform that precisely measures individual proficiency across technical and professional competencies. Utilizing a crowdsourced methodology and gamified testing, the platform delivers rapid skill validation through short, targeted assessments. This enables individuals and organizations to efficiently identify skill gaps and objectively verify capabilities.
Founded in 2010 by Dave Balter and Michael Kowalchik, Smarterer emerged from the recognition that conventional skill validation struggled to keep pace with dynamic industry demands. The founders envisioned a system to quickly and accurately assess specific skill sets. Balter, an experienced entrepreneur, guided the development of its data-driven, adaptive testing methodology.
Smarterer's platform serves individual learners validating expertise and enterprises assessing and developing teams. By offering objective, efficient skill measurement, the company empowers continuous adaptation and growth. Its long-term vision focuses on evolving how professional skills are recognized and cultivated, promoting ongoing learning and streamlined talent management in an ever-changing workforce.
Key people at Smarterer.
Smarterer has raised $7.8M across 5 funding rounds. Most recently, it raised $1.6M Other Equity in February 2014.
# Smarterer: A Technology Company Overview
Smarterer is a skills assessment and competency evaluation platform founded in October 2010 that uses crowdsourced quizzes and machine learning to quickly assess technology competencies and skills[2]. The company provides both consumer-facing assessment tools and enterprise solutions, helping individuals and organizations identify skills gaps and training needs.
Smarterer serves two primary markets: individual learners seeking to understand their technical proficiency levels, and Fortune 500 companies using the platform for hiring, internal evaluations, training, and compliance purposes[2]. The platform's core value proposition centers on answering a fundamental question that learners face: "What should I be learning?" by first identifying existing skills gaps through rigorous, community-validated assessments.
Smarterer was founded in October 2010 as a Boston-based startup with a team of 16 people[2]. The company emerged from the insight that effective learning requires first understanding what you don't know—a principle that became central to its assessment methodology. The platform leveraged crowdsourced quiz creation, allowing an active community of users to create, flag, and edit assessment questions, with the best ones rising to the top through community validation[2].
A pivotal moment came in November 2014 when Pluralsight acquired Smarterer for $75 million[2]. This acquisition represented significant validation of the assessment platform's value and positioned Smarterer's technology within a larger learning ecosystem. Under Pluralsight's ownership, the vision evolved to integrate assessments with video training content to create personalized learning paths addressing identified skills gaps[2].
Smarterer operates at the intersection of skills-based hiring, continuous learning, and workforce development—trends that have accelerated as technology skills become increasingly critical and rapidly evolving. The platform addresses a structural problem in tech education: learners and employers lack reliable, standardized ways to measure technical competency.
By 2014, when Pluralsight acquired the company, the broader market was recognizing that skills assessment needed to precede training recommendations. Smarterer's crowdsourced approach to test creation was ahead of its time, anticipating how community intelligence could improve assessment quality at scale. The acquisition reflected growing recognition that learning platforms needed assessment capabilities to remain competitive and relevant.
Smarterer's acquisition by Pluralsight represented a successful exit for an early-stage assessment company, but it also marked a transition from independent platform to integrated component within a larger learning ecosystem. The company's core innovation—using machine learning and community validation to create rigorous skills assessments—remains relevant in an era where skills-based hiring and continuous upskilling have become organizational imperatives.
The future trajectory likely involves deeper integration of assessment data with AI-driven learning recommendations, personalized career pathing, and potentially expanded use cases in workforce planning and talent mobility. As organizations increasingly adopt skills-based approaches to hiring and development, platforms that can reliably measure and track competency growth will become more valuable, not less.
Smarterer has raised $7.8M in total across 5 funding rounds.
Smarterer's investors include Richard Segal, Deborah Quazzo, Boston Seed Capital, True Ventures, BoxGroup, Caffeinated Capital, Flex Capital, GSV Acceleration, Offline Ventures, Gil Penchina, Slow Ventures, Tribe Capital.
