The company was founded in 2008 by two
BYU graduate students, Brian Whitmer and Devlin Daley. Its initial funding came from
Mozy founder Josh Coates, who served as Instructure's CEO from 2010 to 2018 and chairman of the board through 2020. In December 2010, the
Utah Education Network (UEN), a representative of a number of Utah colleges and universities, announced that Instructure would be replacing
Blackboard. By 2013, the company's customer base had increased to 9 million users. In 2011, Instructure launched Canvas, a learning management system. The company announced that Canvas would be made freely available under an
Affero General Public License (AGPL) license as
open-source software. As of 2025, the core of Canvas was AGPL-licensed and installable, but several commonly-used Infrastructure-plugins were
proprietary, making Canvas
open-core. As of 2020, Canvas was used in approximately 4,000 institutions worldwide. In 2015, Instructure launched Bridge, a cloud-based corporate learning management system. It was acquired by Learning Technologies Group (LTG) in 2021. As of 2015, the company had raised $90 million in funding from investors. On November 13, 2015, the firm began trading as a publicly held company on the
New York Stock Exchange. In 2017, the company acquired Philadelphia based video learning startup
Practice XYZ, formerly known as
ApprenNet and merged the offerings into its own products. In 2020,
Thoma Bravo acquired the company for $2 billion. In June 2021, Instructure again filed for an IPO, and began trading under the symbol INST. In 2024, it was announced that
KKR and
Dragoneer had completed their purchase of the company for $4.8 billion. In 2024, Instructure announced the acquisition of Parchment, a credential management platform. On July 23, 2025,
OpenAI and Instructure announced a global partnership to bring AI tools inside the Canvas LMS. ==See also==