Compass Education, an Australian maker of school management software, acquired Clipboard, a startup whose platform schools use to run sport, clubs, excursions, camps and other co-curricular programs. Compass announced the deal on January 27, 2026.
The price was not disclosed. Startup Daily reported that the deal went through in the period leading up to Christmas 2025 and that it was expected to return up to 10 times the money put in by Clipboard's early investors.
Compass plans to connect Clipboard directly to its own platform, describing the result as an all-in-one system that keeps the depth of a specialist product. Clipboard chief executive Ed Colyer told Startup Daily that for existing customers it would be business as usual, and Compass invited schools to register their interest in the combined offering.
What Clipboard built
Clipboard targets the administration that sits around activities outside the classroom. Schools often handle team selections, permission notes, excursion logistics and camp rosters with spreadsheets, paper forms and separate tools, and Clipboard brings those tasks into one system.
According to Compass, Clipboard is used by more than 500 schools and has over one million users across Australia. When it announced its last funding round in November 2022, Clipboard said it worked with more than 100 schools across Australia and Southeast Asia, so its school count grew roughly fivefold in about three years.
The startup has said its aim was to take the burden of running these programs off schools so that students could get more out of activities beyond lessons. In 2022 it said it planned to use new funding to build further features, hire business development staff to win more Australian schools and expand into international schools.
“Together, we're building the most connected ecosystem for schools.”
Why Compass is buying
Compass sells a platform that schools use for student records, attendance, timetabling, incidents, communications and reporting. Startup Daily described it as a 17-year-old business led by chief executive and co-founder John de la Motte.
The company said it will build a two-way, real-time sync between Clipboard and Compass covering student data, attendance, activities, incidents, timetables, communications and reporting. In practice, that means a teacher marking a student absent for an excursion, or a coach logging an incident at an away game, would no longer need to re-enter the information in a second system.
De la Motte said the deal was about strengthening engagement and simplifying school operations. Colyer said that joining Compass would speed up Clipboard's product roadmap. Compass did not say whether the Clipboard brand will remain or give a timeline for the integration.
The founders and the funding
Colyer and Sam Clarke came up with the idea in 2017 while they were at university and coaching basketball at their former high school in Sydney. Christiaan Hind later joined as a co-founder.
At the time of the 2022 round, Clipboard said that the founders were 27 and 24 years old and that the platform was used by schools in every Australian state as well as in Southeast Asia to manage their co-curricular programs.
Jelix Ventures backed the company in an $850,000 raise in 2020. In late 2022 Clipboard raised $3.1 million in a round led by SaaS investor EVP, with Jelix and Queensland's Sprint Ventures also taking part, and EVP partner Daniel Szekely joined the board. The Australian reports and Clipboard's own announcement gave these amounts without stating a currency.
Startup Daily reported that the sale is the first exit from Jelix Ventures' Fund I. Jelix's Andrea Gardiner said she was proud of what the team had built, and Szekely called the outcome an Australian startup success story.
A busy market for school software
School administration software is a crowded field in which platforms compete to become the single system a school logs into each day. Buying a specialist tool and wiring it into a core platform is a common way to add depth without building a new product from scratch.
For Compass, Clipboard brings an established user base in co-curricular management. For Clipboard's early backers, the deal is a rare return from an Australian edtech startup that never raised a large venture round.
