The story
Jonathan Hefter began developing Neverware's core technology in 2009 after graduating from Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania. In May 2010, Dogpatch Labs invited Hefter to work out of their Manhattan incubator, and in early 2011 Neverware officially formed, moved to General Assembly's Manhattan location, and began operations. Hefter remains at Neverware as chairman.
After a successful pilot program, Neverware launched in January 2013, rolling out its first product—the desktop virtualization platform PCReady—at schools in the New York City area. The product primarily targeted the K-12 school market, as a means of refurbishing older computers in preparation for wider rollouts of electronic standardized tests. By 2015, PCReady had been adopted at 10% of New York City's schools.
While early reception to PCReady was positive, it faced competition in the education market from Google's ChromeOS ecosystem (including Chromebooks), which leveraged cloud services and lightweight hardware. In response, Neverware began developing a fork of Google's open-source ChromiumOS, known as CloudReady, which was designed to "bring the benefits that many school are realizing with products like Chromebooks to a much wider group of schools for a lower price".
In February 2015, Neverware released CloudReady.
In October 2017, Neverware announced that Google would lead its Series B round of investment as a strategic partner and investor.
In March 2018, Neverware announced it would acquire Flint Innovations, the UK-based company behind Flint OS, another offshoot of ChromiumOS.
On December 16, 2020, Neverware announced that it had been acquired by Google, and that its employees would join the main ChromeOS team. The company stated that there would be no immediate changes to the CloudReady product. In July 2022, Google released ChromeOS Flex, an official offshoot of ChromeOS with a similar focus to CloudReady.
From Wikipedia’s article on Neverware, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5