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Finetune co-founder Ogden Morse
August 10, 2022
A Maine Venture Fund portfolio firm sold to Baltimore tech company
A firm that got its start in Maine and specializes in Artificial Intelligence-assisted education and workforce software tools has been acquired by a Baltimore company.
Finetune was founded in Falmouth by educator and entrepreneur Ogden Morse with his father. More recently, it has been run by CEO Steve Shapiro and is based in Boston. It has been in the portfolio of the Maine Venture Fund.
On Thursday, Maine Venture Fund announced that Finetune has been sold to Baltimore-based Prometric, a provider of technology-enabled testing and assessment solutions.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
“We are grateful for the early foundational support from the Maine startup ecosystem, including Maine Venture Fund and several Maine-based individual investors,” Shapiro said in Maine Venture Fund’s press release. “This next phase of growth with Prometric allows us to further build on our success, taking these solutions to market at scale and continuing to invest in emerging technologies that address the needs of the wide cross section of markets we serve."
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Brien Walton, chair of Maine Venture Fund
Brien Walton, chair of the Maine Venture Fund board, said: “Finetune is a great example of the type of success we work towards with each one of our portfolio companies. Given our unique structure as a state-sponsored fund, MVF serves as a critical economic development tool within Maine for supporting entrepreneurial activity and job growth. MVF first invested in Finetune in 2015, and as a result of this positive return of capital, we'll be able to recycle these funds into many more investments in other Maine-based companies."
In its own press release, Prometric cited Finetune’s flagship products, Generate and Catalog, Prometric said Generate and Catalog “are the world’s first commercially available products to use state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing transformer models to power AI-driven content generation and classification."
“The addition of Finetune to Prometric’s portfolio represents a significant opportunity to not only bring cutting-edge AI content and assessment technology to our suite of solutions but to transform the way organizations address the challenges they face in a rapidly changing learning landscape. I am excited by the opportunity that these advanced capabilities represent for the way we support our customers and test takers,” Roy Simrell, president and CEO of Prometric, said in the firm’s news release.
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