About Us

Instructure Inc. was founded in 2008 with the purpose of disrupting the Learning Management System (LMS) market by setting a new, open standard for education technology. We believe that an LMS shouldn’t be a closed system. It should be an easy to use, powerful platform that easily integrates content and communication from everywhere. We believe technology is necessary, but not sufficient to improve education. Technology is only a tool, and a tool is only as good as the skills of the craftsman, but using a great tool sure helps.

Instructure is backed by OpenView Venture Partners, TomorrowVentures, EPIC Ventures and Tim Draper of Draper, Fisher Jurveston. It is based in Salt Lake City, Utah where the software is developed and supported on the east bench of the Wasatch Mountains.

Josh Coates, CEO

Josh Coates began his career in distributed systems research at the University of California, Berkeley and Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center. Josh specialized in high performance and parallel disk and network I/O. In 1998 Josh graduated with a degree in Computer Science and began working at Inktomi Corporation developing network caching software.

In 1999 Josh founded Scale Eight, which developed scalable storage software technologies. Scale Eight’s customers included Microsoft, Viacom and Fujitsu. Scale Eight closed operations in early 2003 and sold its intellectual property to Intel Corporation. After relocating to Utah, Josh founded Berkeley Data Systems (Mozy.com) in 2005. Two years later in October 2007, EMC Corp acquired Mozy for $76 million.

In 2007, Josh took a volunteer position as an adjunct instructor at Brigham Young University. Josh was an early investor in Instructure and joined the board in 2008. In 2010, Josh became CEO of Instructure.

Brian Whitmer, Co-Founder

Brian Whitmer graduated from Brigham Young University in 2008 with a master's degree in Computer Science. His research emphasis was Human-Computer Interaction, specifically dealing with end-user applications and products. Brian worked with interaction experts on understanding core usability principles, and on applying those principles to general software design. He closely studied end-user interactions with software products and how to discover and resolve end-user frustrations through basic usability and hallway testing.

Brian has spent the last three years managing development of the Canvas product. His experience in usability has been integral to understanding the needs of students and educators, and in developing a product that is both intuitive and approachable. His contribution has helped make Canvas the most intuitive learning management system on the market today.

Devlin Daley, Co-Founder

Devlin Daley graduated with a master's degree in Computer Science from Brigham Young University with a focus on distributed authentication systems.

His research started in the Enterprise Computing Lab studying virtualization and its effects on systems performance. He later contributed to user-centric authentication protocols that empower users to control their own online identity.

The underlying principle through his technical contributions is to focus on user needs and usability throughout the technical specification of protocols to create a solid foundation for lay users to understand complicated systems while maintaining security characteristics.

At Instructure, Devlin combined his technical understanding with his passion for improving education. His expertise contributed to the creation of an LMS with a solid foundation that lay users can understand and with the highest security characteristics.

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