| Notes |
The Solution
Prior to its seemingly overnight success, Declara was an incredibly ambitious idea, centered around predictive and machine learning technologies and spun out of Pierson Labs, the original parent company and namesake of Ramona Pierson. Pierson Labs approached ISBX in the fall of 2012 with the goal of building a suite of intelligent mobile products centered around the social interactions of people like journalists and educators. These applications, more than just social networks, were designed to collect an array of content - anything from simple text, to conversations, topics and images, within an accessible platform that would enable the users use of such features like the camera, location based services, and a general medium to interact with other users regardless of where they were. These apps were targeted towards a broad range of topics such as social issues and progressive learning, with the ultimate goal of validating one's own personal learning experience.
At the earliest stages of the engagement, the client was absent of its own development team, and exclusively relied on ISBX for the daunting task of assessing significant amounts of highly proprietary concepts and distilling these into an executable product - in one specific case, building the first pieces of the platform for the largest, national, non-profit and government run education system, within a highly compressed time frame.
The nature of the project, a fast-evolving and constantly improving software system, required an equally well adapted project management and software development methodology to support it. ISBX determined that using an Agile/SCRUM process would allow both teams to iterate and enhance the platform on an almost real-time basis while allowing for valuable product feedback by its stakeholders. Through the use of its Certified Scrum Masters (CSM), ISBX's robust program management process addressed things like:
Building the core software product
Enhancing the core software product with new systems and features
Developer operations such as scalable infrastructure enhancements and configurability
Software Releases and Release Planning
Regression and Quality Assurance Testing
Engaging with the Client on the overall vision
ISBX was also granted partial ownership and responsibility of the product itself, allowing us to make critical decisions in the product planning phases to assure successful delivery of the product in aggressive timeframes. ISBX credits the synergistic relationship with Pierson Labs in enabling it accessibility to lightning fast decisions and the eventual shaping of the Declara product as it stands today.
4,000,000+
Downloads
$21,000,000
In Venture
30
Countries
+
24
Languages
The engagement also served as a testament to ISBX's concentrated expertise in building technology solutions and leveraged our experience in advanced technologies such as:
Elastic Search
Natural Language Processing
Architecture of Horizontally Scalable Frameworks
Building and Adapting Social Network Platforms
The result was one of the most successful launches of a startup in ISBX's experience, with the first official round of seed funding occurring in September of 2013 leading up to a Series A round in April of 2014. ISBX continues to remain engaged and active with Declara, operating a dedicated team of software development professionals for the continually growing startup. |