Tom Davidson’s early business travel came with an awkward question: could they afford somewhere to sleep? He and his fellow founders had rented a tired RV, put expenses on credit cards and set off to introduce their education venture. By the final night of one trip, a hotel lobby couch had become the accommodation. The future seller of a company for roughly $750 million was learning the economics of upholstery.
He would recount the episode with a joke about the vehicle’s lingering need for a cleanup. There is a useful detail beneath the joke. Before Everfi persuaded companies to pay for other people’s education, its founders had to pay for the experiment themselves. Financial literacy, one of their first subjects, was enjoying a rather practical rehearsal.
Davidson had already tried a different route to improving schools. He had won an election, sat through funding arguments and helped bring internet connections to public institutions. Starting a business gave him another way to pursue a question that followed him out of politics: how do you deliver useful lessons when the people who need them have no budget to buy them?
The college senior with a constituency
In 1994, while a senior at Bowdoin College, Davidson ran for the Maine House of Representatives. He won and went on to serve three terms, leaving the legislature in 2000. It is an unusually brisk answer to the familiar undergraduate question of what comes next. Most graduation plans require a résumé. His involved voters.
His work brought him into the plumbing of education technology. As chairman of the Utilities and Energy Committee, he helped expand the wiring of schools and libraries. The subject sounds prosaic beside the later glamour of venture investment. Yet a connection is a prerequisite: an online lesson cannot reach a classroom that cannot get online.
Looking back, he described the frustration of school funding debates and the advantages that accrued to children in better-funded places. He also worked with Governor Angus King on the effort that led to Maine’s one-to-one laptop initiative. The experience supplied both an interest in technology and a dissatisfaction with the way opportunity depended on geography. He had seen the machinery from inside the chamber.
His next professional stop was venture capital, including Village Ventures. He later called himself a “very subpar venture capitalist,” an assessment delivered with rather more relish than most investors bring to their biographies. The useful inheritance was exposure to young technology businesses: products could be built, financed and distributed through channels quite different from a state appropriation.
Maine legislator.
after three terms.
in Washington, D.C.
A school lesson with a different customer
Everfi began in 2008. Davidson’s co-founders were Jon Chapman and Ray Martinez, fellow Bowdoin alumni. Chapman and Martinez brought experience in education operations, including work at Kaplan. Davidson brought policy and finance. The division of experience mattered: a promising educational idea still needs someone who knows how to deliver it.
The company’s approach was to enlist businesses and other organizations to sponsor digital education. Schools could use those funded courses without paying for them. Financial education offered an intelligible starting point. Banks had reasons to support it; students faced decisions about money; teachers could use materials that made those decisions less abstract.
The product used games, animation and simulations to make subjects such as credit, borrowing and budgeting concrete. In 2010, the Bowdoin trio rang the Nasdaq bell as Everfi announced that its financial literacy platform had reached more than 2,000 schools. A business that had begun with founders worrying about their own expenses was teaching students how to think about theirs.
There was an operational wrinkle. Selling to a sponsor did not automatically make a course useful in a classroom. By 2014, Davidson was describing a daily dashboard of schools whose usage was falling behind. Staff would contact teachers and, when necessary, drive out to help. The software business had acquired a school visitation schedule.
“You have to have a ground game.”
Tom Davidson, on reaching schools
At that point, 64 of the company’s 145 employees were former educators. That staffing choice gave the model a practical texture. Teachers had to fit the material into real school days, with local constraints and competing demands. A national sales pitch could win the contract; patient work with individual classrooms helped determine whether students actually used what had been bought.
Getting capital to join the class
By 2017, Everfi had drawn backing from investors including Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt and Evan Williams. The recognizable names were useful calling cards. More consequential was the proposition underneath them: a company could sell education to institutions, deliver it to learners and build a recurring business around that relationship.
In April that year, Everfi announced a $190 million financing round. The Rise Fund contributed $120 million and TPG Growth another $30 million. It was the first investment by The Rise Fund, which had been established to pursue measurable social and environmental results alongside financial returns. Education and technology met neatly in its remit.
The money arrived as the business extended across schools, universities and workplace training. Everfi had also acquired LawRoom and Workplace Answers. Expansion made the company more than the financial literacy project of its early years. It brought a broader collection of customers, courses and expectations under the same roof.
Davidson’s ambition was commercial as well as educational. He wanted a substantial software company that addressed a defined set of important problems and made a profit doing so. There is a pleasing lack of coyness in that combination. The sponsors needed a reason to renew; learners needed something worth learning; the business needed the arithmetic to work.
- Rise Fund · $120m
- TPG Growth · $30m
- Other investors · $40m
The joke before the board meeting
Davidson’s public manner offers occasional relief from the solemnity of his subjects. At a 2015 Connectpreneur conversation, as questions came at him, he observed: “This is like a board meeting.” He could discuss a serious business without dressing every answer in a suit of managerial abstraction.
There was a competitive history behind the easy delivery. Bowdoin’s squash records list him as the team’s 1993-94 captain. The same student who was preparing to enter electoral politics had a second setting in which an opponent was entitled to return the ball. Neither activity particularly rewards assuming that your first attempt has settled the matter.
His discussions of leadership were less about projecting certainty than maintaining direction while changing the team around it. He acknowledged the discomfort of bringing in people with experience growing organizations beyond the scale he knew. Loyalty to an idea need not require pretending that its founder already possesses every skill it will eventually demand.
In 2013, he received an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award for Greater Washington. Public recognition marked the distance traveled from the RV. His accounts of the early company, though, kept returning to his co-founders and their working relationship. Chapman’s operations background, Martinez’s education experience and Davidson’s policy interests were ingredients in a shared enterprise.
A sale, and the chapter after the sale
Blackbaud’s purchase of Everfi closed on December 31, 2021, and was announced in January 2022. The consideration was approximately $750 million in cash and stock. At the announcement, Everfi had reached more than 45 million learners globally. Davidson and the executive team joined the buyer.
The later history resists a tidy victory lap. Davidson served as a Blackbaud executive vice president and Everfi president until September 2024. At the end of that year, Blackbaud sold Everfi to an unaffiliated private investment firm for nominal consideration. Blackbaud reported that the business had underperformed and that the anticipated returns on its acquisition had not materialized.
Those are company outcomes, with different dates and different circumstances. They belong in the story alongside the original sale. A transaction price records what a buyer agreed to pay at a particular moment; the work of operating the company continues afterward. Everfi’s current leadership lists co-founder Ray Martinez as CEO.
From digital classrooms to Montgomery
Davidson’s next chapter brings an older interest closer to the foreground. LendingTree’s 2026 proxy identifies him as founder and chief executive of Holt Street. He has also served on LendingTree’s board since 2017. The combination keeps him connected to corporate life while his work in Alabama takes a more personal turn.
He has described becoming the owner of One Dexter Avenue in Montgomery and restoring it with builders, historians and his partner Soly Zarrini. In explaining the project, he recalled his father making him watch civil rights documentaries as a child. His interest in that history predates the business biography by decades.
That interest had already entered Everfi’s curriculum. In 2015, the company partnered with Neustar to bring its 306 African-American History course to schools. More recently, Holt Street participants have described meeting civil rights attorney Fred Gray, visiting Montgomery’s historical sites and walking the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. Learning here involves leaving the screen and going to the place.
Across these chapters, Davidson keeps arranging encounters between people who have resources and people or subjects that deserve their attention. The setting has changed from a legislative chamber to a classroom to a restored building. He still seems interested in getting people into the room. With luck, this time everyone has booked a bed.