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Tyler Bosmeny, center, chief executive of Clever Inc. in San Francisco, whose service acts as a middleman for schools and educational apps.Credit Jason Henry for The New York Times

For years, Mark Racine, the technology director of the Boston Public Schools, and his team plodded through a cumbersome exercise at the start of each school year: transferring student roster information from school databases to the various learning apps that teachers wanted to use in the classroom.

About 57,000 students attend Boston schools, and to make matters worse, the data required to set up student accounts had to be sent in a variety of ways. Some math and reading sites asked for students’ names and classes to be sent by email. Other apps needed spreadsheets. And each digital learning company required the district to update student information at different times.

“It was hard for us to keep track,” Mr. Racine said in a recent phone interview.

So last month the Boston district turned to Clever, a software service that enables schools to send their student information to various web and mobile apps at the click of a button.

Using Clever’s dashboard, administrators can select which specific details about a student to transfer. They can also decide whether to share that information for students in an entire district or, for example, the entire eighth grade or a particular elementary school.

“With Clever, it can be as simple as clicking a box that says, ‘share this grade’ or ‘share this class,’ ” Mr. Racine said. “It’s a huge load off our plate at the beginning of the year.”

With the adoption of Clever, he added, Boston this month introduced a “digital backpack” — an online portal students can use to get access to district-managed apps.

Founded in 2012 by three friends in their 20s who met as Harvard undergraduates, Clever Inc. offers a straightforward utility. The middleman software service acts like a pipe that, on one end, connects to a school district’s student information system. Then it funnels information received from schools to learning apps that set up connections on the other end.

More than 44,000 elementary and secondary schools — about one-third of the kindergarten through 12th-grade schools in the United States — now work with the service, company executives said.

Clever is clearly benefiting from the increasing adoption of education software for prekindergarten through 12th grade in the United States, a market estimated at nearly $8.4 billion last year by the Software and Information Industry Association. It has positioned itself as a partial answer to questions from politicians and parents about how much data those kinds of tools may collect on students and how that information is secured and used.

“We hear horror stories all of the time,” said Tyler Bosmeny, the chief executive and a co-founder of Clever, citing school administrators who have disclosed data for an entire district when only one class needed to use an app. Other schools, Mr. Bosmeny said, “are sharing data about students long after they graduate.”

Clever is gaining ground at a time when many districts use legacy student information databases that were not set up to integrate directly with dozens of learning apps or allow students access through a single portal.

Clever has raised $43 million from investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and GSV Capital.

The service is free to schools. The company charges most app developers that integrate with its system $5 to $25 per school per month; executives at a few learning apps that come free for students and teachers said that Clever did not charge them to use its service. The application gallery on Clever’s site lists more than 130 apps that work with the company. Mr. Bosmeny declined to discuss the company’s revenue.

Clever’s success stands in marked contrast to a similar enterprise called inBloom, a nonprofit organization that proposed to act as a data conduit for schools but shut down last year.

Clever’s service differs from inBloom’s in some important respects. InBloom’s service was intended to house and integrate school districts’ huge student databases in cloud storage — while Clever’s service collects and sends only the data that schools choose to share with a particular educational site. Those details can include a student’s name, ID number, address, date of birth, gender, race and Hispanic ethnicity, and whether the student is an English-language learner.

Boston public schools, for instance, transfer only student name, class and teacher name to Clever.

“It’s just a few data points,” said Mr. Racine, the technology director for the Boston schools. “We are not sending over schedules or any sort of grades, nothing like that.”

Clever does not address some of the larger problems districts are grappling with — such as how school administrators can keep tabs on the free data-driven apps that teachers may independently download and use in their classrooms. But at least the service allows administrators to manage and monitor those apps their students log into through Clever. It also allows students access to a variety of school-approved apps with the same user name and password, even if they transfer to another school in the same district.

“It saves tons of person-hours in terms of creating those accounts and managing them,” said Scott Smith, chief technology officer of the Mooresville Graded School District in Mooresville, N.C.

Whether Clever is sustainable as a stand-alone business remains to be seen.

As education technology vendors develop more sophisticated student information systems, they could potentially provide their own services to allow schools to integrate directly with apps, making third parties like Clever unnecessary. A few educational app developers that work with Clever said it was not yet clear whether the service would prove to be the ultimate solution for schools to manage learning app accounts, or merely a transitional technology.

For their part, Clever executives say there is value in trying to solve certain practical problems that many schools face.

“We’re solving the challenges of today while iterating as fast as we can to solve the problems they’ll have tomorrow,” Mr. Bosmeny said.

In fact, some school technology directors said Clever saved them so much time that they wished more educational sites would integrate with it.

“Now, when vendors offer us a new tool, we ask if they are integrated with Clever,” said Mr. Racine in Boston. “If they say ‘no,’ I have to build a new process just for your one tool.”