DECLARA: Over $5 million to Palo Alto, CA-based Declara from Peter Thiel, Founders Fund and Data Collective, reports VentureBeat. The startup offers an "intelligent social learning platform" that learns how users interact in order to deliver personalized suggestions on potential collaborators and resources for projects. Declara is currently being used in Australian public schools to help teachers implement a single nationwide curriculum, as well as in Chile, Mexico and Latin America. (The company also has customers in big banking and biotech companies like Genentech.) Bloomberg Businessweek calls co-founder and CEO Ramona Pierson "the most inspirational woman in tech" after her amazing recovery from a near-fatal accident to serve as CTO at Seattle Public Schools and build a previous edtech startup, SynapticMash, that was sold to Promethean in 2010.
