An online exam begins with a minor act of faith. A school sends questions into a room it cannot see. A student answers beneath a camera, perhaps at a kitchen table, perhaps after midnight. Somewhere between them sits a piece of software asked to establish identity, observe behavior and preserve a fair record of what happened. Mike Murphy has spent more than a decade in that middle space. It is not the glamorous end of education technology. Nobody puts “exam integrity workflow” on a university sweatshirt. Yet it is where the credibility of remote learning either holds or comes loose.
Murphy arrived there by a route that makes sense only after you see the connecting thread. He spent six years in the U.S. Army, serving as an intelligence analyst. He later worked as a defense contractor on biometrics-enabled intelligence. Then came marketing at Everblue, an education company focused on sustainability training. Security, identity, education, communication: the pieces were already on the table. ProctorFree was the moment they formed a picture.
The analyst learns to sell
At Everblue, Murphy worked as director of marketing. His future co-founder, Velvet Nelson, led sales and accreditation. They had met in a business built around teaching people and proving that the teaching counted. Nelson brought experience in higher and online education; Murphy brought analysis, systems thinking and a new education in how attention becomes demand. Almost from their first meeting, they entertained the possibility of building something together. When Everblue was acquired, the hypothetical company became a practical question.
The first version was called MyLearningID. Its premise was direct: online education could grow only if institutions had credible ways to know who was taking an assessment and what occurred during it. In 2013, a published teaching case described a browser-based system capturing video, screen and audio streams. The company soon took the name ProctorFree, which traded subtlety for the useful virtue of explaining the assignment.
Murphy’s comparison between a startup and the military was not a claim that the stakes were identical. It was about rhythm. Both reward a clear mission, comfort with incomplete information and the ability to keep several urgent things moving. He has said military service helped him live with a baseline of stress and run projects in parallel. More revealingly, he said he liked challenges and “a bit of discomfort” at work. Startup life, with its talent for manufacturing fresh discomfort before breakfast, obliged.
A grant, a launch and the long college hallway
Early company building happened in public increments. In February 2013, ProctorFree was selected as one of ten companies for RevTech Labs at Packard Place in Charlotte. Murphy said the team was most excited about the connections it would make. That spring, 159 companies applied for an NC IDEA grant. ProctorFree became one of five winners, the only one from the Charlotte area, and received $40,000. The money helped with product finishing and early marketing. More important, the award gave a young company another reason to keep going.
The product launched on January 1, 2014. Its pitch removed the choreography of the testing center: no drive, no fixed appointment, no special room. The student could take an exam when ready, while the institution received a record for review. Convenience was easy to explain. The harder part was selling new infrastructure into higher education, where buying decisions can move with the stately confidence of an old campus clock. Faculty, administrators, technology teams and accrediting concerns all had a vote, formal or otherwise.
From signals to a company
Army intelligence and defense work in biometrics build a habit of verification.
Murphy joins Everblue in marketing and meets Velvet Nelson.
RevTech Labs, a new name and a competitive NC IDEA grant move the idea forward.
ProctorFree launches its on-demand exam-proctoring service.
Murphy co-chairs an industry working group on standards for observing tests online.
One early moment survived in Murphy’s memory because it compressed the entire proposition into a telephone call. The first person to find the ProctorFree website organically and call the founders was a veteran. For Murphy, the connection was personal: a veteran-built company had been found by a veteran looking for a way to pursue education at a distance. Before dashboards and partnerships, there was simply a person who needed the thing they were making.
Software watches; people decide
The name ProctorFree can sound like a promise to remove people entirely. The operating reality became more nuanced. The platform collects signals across a test taker’s screen, audio and video environment, flags moments for attention and gives administrators evidence to review. The machine can narrow the field; a policy and a person still determine what the signal means. Looking away from a screen may be suspicious, or it may be a human being thinking. The distinction is not a footnote. It is the work.
One exam, three streams
Illustrative, not a performance score. The bars show the parallel data streams described in ProctorFree’s assessment workflow.
This helps explain why Murphy later spoke so insistently about customer service. Exams carry consequences: grades, certifications and sometimes job offers. A malfunction that would be mildly annoying in a music app becomes frightening when a clock is running and a credential is at stake. Murphy argued that support, product design and customer feedback belong to the same system. In his formulation, each proctored test is also a test of the proctoring company. Software vendors do not usually volunteer to sit their own exam every day. The good ones notice that they already do.
ProctorFree raised outside capital, including a financing round announced at the end of 2015 with Real Ventures and Task Force X Capital. Murphy’s verdict on fundraising was characteristically compact: “All investment money is not the same.” For a veteran-led company, investors who understood military experience could shorten difficult conversations. Capital bought time and hiring capacity; shared context reduced the amount of translation required before using either.
The operator becomes a standard-setter
By 2021, Murphy was leading ProctorFree as CEO. The company continued forming partnerships with learning platforms and education providers, including Jenzabar and Moodle specialist Markanyx. In 2022 it received a second consecutive place on Education Technology Insights’ list of ten distance and remote learning solution companies. Awards make tidy milestones. The more telling development came in a document with almost no glamour at all: a ninety-eight-page set of standards and best practices for observing tests online.
Murphy co-chaired the joint working group convened by the Association of Test Publishers and the National College Testing Association. Its membership crossed a normally competitive industry: testing programs, universities, technology companies and assessment vendors. The work addressed test sponsors, providers and individual test takers. For a founder, joining such a process means moving beyond selling one company’s answer. It means helping the field agree on better questions, common language and lines that should not be crossed.
There is a pleasing circularity to Murphy’s career. The intelligence analyst began by interpreting signals in high-pressure environments. The marketer learned to explain a proposition to strangers. The founder built a system that gathers signals for institutions separated from students by distance. The executive then helped write shared practices for how an industry should handle that responsibility. Each role revised the previous one rather than erasing it.
The useful lesson is translation
Founder biographies often pretend that every prior job was secretly training for the company to come. Life is rarely so courteous. Murphy could not have known that biometrics, marketing, online learning and military leadership would converge in a browser during an exam. What he did know was how to carry capabilities across borders. Analysis could become product judgment. Stress tolerance could become operating rhythm. Leadership could be assembled from behaviors worth borrowing and mistakes worth declining.
That is the practical idea to steal from his story. A career does not need a perfect plot. It needs a person alert enough to notice which skills travel. Murphy’s public comments return to mission, discomfort, relationships and service. None is a patented framework. Together they explain how he stayed with an unfashionable, consequential problem while online education moved from an alternative to ordinary infrastructure.
Somewhere tonight, a student will open a laptop and begin an exam. No marble hall, no rows of desks, no wall clock making theatrical little clicks. The institution will still need confidence in the result, and the student will still deserve a process that treats them as more than a suspicious set of pixels. Between those obligations sits the quiet machinery Murphy chose to build: imperfect, procedural, necessary, and always taking a test of its own.
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