Lightspeed Systems is an educational software company based in

Austin, Texas Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of Texas, as well as the county seat, seat and largest city of Travis County, Texas, Travis County, with portions extending into Hays County, Texas, Hays and Williamson County, Texas, Williamson co ...

that builds and sells

SaaS Software as a service (SaaS ) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is also known as "on-demand software" and Web-based/Web-hosted software. SaaS is cons ...

content-control software,

mobile device management Mobile device management (MDM) is the administration of mobile devices, such as smartphones, tablet computers, and laptops. MDM is usually implemented with the use of a third-party product that has management features for particular vendors of m ...

, alert software, and classroom management software to

K–12 K–12, from kindergarten to 12th grade, is an American English expression that indicates the range of years of publicly supported primary and secondary education found in the United States, which is similar to publicly supported school grade ...

schools.

History

Founded in 1999 in

Bakersfield, California Bakersfield is a city in Kern County, California, United States. It is the county seat and largest city of Kern County. The city covers about near the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley and the Central Valley region. Bakersfield's populat ...

, Lightspeed Systems, Inc., develops content filtering, mobile device management, and device monitoring software targeted to the education market. It is headquartered in

with an office in Brentwood, Essex (United Kingdom). The company has about 200 employees. In 2012, ''Inc.com'' ranked the company #1855 out of the ''Inc 5000''. However, ''Inc.com'' did not list the company as part of the ''Inc 5000'' after 2012. In 2019, Lightspeed Systems received an investment from Madison Dearborn Partners. In January 2022, they acquired CatchOn, a real-time data analytics provider that helps with student engagement, and in March, Lightspeed received another investment from

Genstar Capital Genstar Capital is a private equity firm that executes leveraged buyout transactions in middle-market companies based in North America. Founded in 1988, Genstar currently has approximately $33 billion in assets under management. Based in San ...

Products

Mobile Device Management

In 2013, Lightspeed introduced mobile device management. Mobile device management helps school IT staff to manage school devices more easily through the use of policies.

Filter

In 2017, Lightspeed announced the Relay Filter, which was then renamed to just Lightspeed Filter. Lightspeed Systems advertises their Filter product as blocking "inappropriate" content, and a tool for CIPA compliance. It originally was only supported on Chromebooks. However in 2018 support for Mac OS,

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also includes ...

, and

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

was announced.

Classroom Management

In April 2018, Lightspeed released Classroom, classroom management software which the company claims can monitor and control content loaded on devices used by students during class.

Analytics

In March 2019, Lightspeed Systems released Analytics for reporting on apps, applications, and web sites used on school owned devices.

Alert

In 2021 Lightspeed announced Alert, a product the company says uses AI and human review to identify threats of school violence or student self-harm.

Criticism

Lightspeed Systems has been criticized by students for the amount of content blocked by the system. There have also been privacy concerns brought up by many students. In 2012, Darryl LaGacé, head of IT in San Diego Unified School District, left to go work for Lightspeed Systems after previously procuring a $375,000 contract with them earlier that year. This brought up many concerns and scrutiny. In 2012, Lightspeed Systems raised questionable behavior when directly mass emailing customers accounts to poach from partner accounts.

References

{{reflist, 2 1999 establishments in California Companies based in Bakersfield, California Education companies established in 1999 Content-control software Internet safety Software companies based in California Software companies of the United States Software companies established in 1999