PALO ALTO, CA--(Marketwired - Sep 26, 2013) -  Today, Declara announces its intelligent social learning platform that combines collaboration, intuitive search, and analytics to help organizations work smarter and faster. Declara is also revealing it has received a substantial amount of funding from Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and first investor in both Facebook and Palantir Technologies; Founders Fund, an early backer of companies like SpaceX and Yammer; and Data Collective, a high profile, Big Data-focused Silicon Valley venture capital fund.

Declara connects tens of millions of people simultaneously to massive amounts of content and enables them to search, study, interact, and measure progress, all collaboratively. Underlying Declara's ease of use and massive scale is a unique combination of multiple forms of sophisticated machine learning and a breakthrough cognitive model of how people acquire new skills. This core intelligence system observes how Declara users learn and with whom they learn most effectively. For each user, Declara learns quickly how to become the analog of an effective and involved human mentor: intuitively delivering useful content the users may not have found on their own, seamlessly connecting them to other users who can help improve outcomes, and making search and discovery swift and painless.

"At Declara we understand that personal and professional development are lifelong pursuits, and we are delivering technology to enable people everywhere, at every stage of their lives, to learn and grow. We recognize an expansive opportunity to help companies and people come together to collaborate, learn, and innovate," said Ramona Pierson, founder of Declara. "With Declara, we've built an intelligent social learning platform that combines collaboration, intuitive search, and deep analytics, powered by an extremely innovative user interface to help organizations work smarter," added Nelson González, Declara's other founder.

Declara's platform delivers features like social collaboration, frictionless semantic search, rapid content creation, intelligent chat, live mentoring, self and peer assessment, and progress tracking, all woven together by Declara's core intelligence system. Additionally, each of Declara's features can be transparently combined and integrated with other enterprise software, such as existing systems for security and authorization, content management, email, and other communications media.

Declara's unique functionality and deep intelligence have already won considerable global business, including Fortune 500 corporations, major universities, and governments that need to maximize their ability to collaborate, learn, and innovate. For example:

• A top-ten G-20 government is using Declara as an intelligent collaborative social network that enables all of the country's teachers to implement the new national curriculum, and to solve implementation challenges in real time.
  
  
• One of the world's three largest pharmaceutical companies is using Declara to develop innovation capacities among its researchers and clinicians, so that they can redesign the clinical trial process.
  
  
• A major international foundation uses Declara in another G-20 country to deliver highly complex training nationwide to tens of thousands of employees of the largest Ministry in the country.
  
  
• One of the top 50 best run banks in the world (as ranked by Global Finance) uses Declara to enable its teams to innovate around new products, comply with regulations more effectively, and launch and support products far more quickly and inexpensively than possible before.

Many of Declara's major customers use Declara's advanced analytics and dynamic dashboards to map the effectiveness of their organizations' human capital on a daily basis. Declara's analytics understand how people collaborate and learn, what content they use or generate, and which peers and mentors help them the most. Declara's dynamic dashboards represent these insights in real time. Collectively, these capabilities not only empower users to work more intelligently and effectively, but also help content providers improve their products and organizational leaders to make smarter decisions. As Declara learns, it enables all the participants in this broad ecosystem to do better, faster, as they learn from each other.

"There's no question that over the past decade, social media has transformed the way people socialize, organize, and conduct business. This has had remarkable implications, making many tasks more efficient while allowing for deeper, richer relationships," said Peter Thiel, Managing Partner, Founders Fund. "Declara caught our attention because it represents a logical evolutionary step: a social tool that enables more intelligent, precise, and useful collaboration."

"Professional development and training programs -- and traditional software to deliver them -- consume many tens of billions of dollars globally, and yet productivity gains have been minimal at best," said Matt Ocko, co-Managing Partner of Data Collective. "Declara has proven that it can deliver exponential learning gains and a dramatic reduction in the cost of these programs worldwide. Data Collective invests in great teams applying deep technology to solve these kind of huge problems, so Declara was a great fit for us."

Declara's team is composed of individuals with significant backgrounds in the fields of artificial intelligence, neuroscience, software development, social innovation, education, professional development, health, security and intelligence, mathematics, engineering, and marketing. The Declara team has been operating in stealth to commercialize several years of prior work, and has been delivering the Declara platform to customers since May of 2012.

Complementing the team's experience, Declara's Board of Directors brings together several leading entrepreneurs and advisors, including venture capital investor and technologist Matt Ocko of Data Collective, prominent educational advisors Kelly Pope (former VP Engineering of Classroom Connect) and John Danielson (former Chief of Staff of the US Department of Education), as well as some key technical and business leaders such as Maria Martinez, President at Salesforce.com, and Debra Chrapaty, former Senior Vice President of Cisco Systems and Corporate Vice President of Microsoft.

For more information about getting your company or organization up and running with Declara, visit www.declara.com.

ABOUT DECLARA

Declara is an intelligent social learning platform that combines collaboration, intuitive search and analytics to help organizations work smarter and faster. Declara intelligently connects large numbers of people to massive amounts of content and to each other. It uses a unique cognitive model combined with deep machine learning to observe how people collaborate and learn, and adjust accordingly. Over time Declara seamlessly and automatically delivers the right content and connections, at the right time, to maximize the learning capability of individuals and entire organizations.