ILinc - LearnLinc - Mentergy             The ILinc Story -Chapter 3 of Changing the World Entrepreneurship 

ILINC was founded in 1993 by Jack Wilson and two students, Degerhan Usluel and Mark Bernstein, at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.  The company grew rapidly with the initial funding coming from bootstrapping and then going through three rounds of venture capital. Later the name was changed to LearnLinc to match the name of its popular product, and eventually LearnLinc entered a triple merger in early 2000 with Gilat Communications and Allen Communications to form the Mentergy Corporation (NASDAQ).  In March of 2000, the company was valued at over $500 million on the NASDAQ stock market.  Wilson, Usluel, and Bernstein left the company soon thereafter and then the dot-com bust threw Mentergy into bankruptcy in 2002.  Arizona based EDT bought the ILinc portion of Mentergy and relaunched it under the original name and then named the entire company as ILinc.  In 2011, BroadSoft acquired ILinc and then in 2019 CISCO acquired BroadSoft and thus ILinc. -                         The Wall Street Journal featured ILinc in 1997.  As one can see, the user interface was the first commerical demonstration of the technologies that underly products like WebEx, Zoom, Blackboard, and Microsoft Teams today.	Mark Bernstein, Jack Wilson, and Degerhan Usluel receive an award ILinc Brochure circa 1995 ILinc LearnLinc Screen in 1995.  We had multicast live video in the upper left corner, a shared screen in the right, a polling app under the live video and a chat box under that.  Our first copycat was Centra followed by WebEx, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams.	Mark Rice, Mark Bernstein, Degerhan Usluel and Jack Wilson in UMass Club in December 2024.   Andy Grove, the CEO of Intel, presents the ILinc LearnLinc product at a conference after Intel both made a purchase of the software and invested $2.5 million in ILinc. ILinc was selected for the William Glazer Entrepreneur of the Year Award by RPI in 2019.
	ILinc Case Study