Europe's first edtech unicorn & more

Edtech funding is going 🚀

In the decade starting 2010, EdTech Venture Capital investments were at $500m and finished 14x higher at $7B in 2019. At this time Edtech analyst firm HolonIQ projects that $87B will be invested over the next 10 years between 2020-2029, almost tripling the prior decade. Will this trend continue? And how will the increased funding change the Edtech scene?

Interesting news last week: the nonprofit mooc provider (started by MIT and Harvard) has been sold for 800M to 2U, a for profit provider of online degree.

Although 2U pledged to: guarantee affordability through the continuation of a free version of online courses, it will not only be interesting to see how the universities will respond. I'm very curious how the strategy will change now MIT & Harvard are no longer in the drivers seat. With a 30M initial investment in 2013, they at least have some extra cash now to ignite some new innovations.

Why is 2U spending $800M to buy edX? And why is edX selling?

In our last newsletter we wrote about GoStudent's series B. Only a few months later, the tutoring platform is announcing their series C, leading towards the unicorn status. SoftBank, Tencent and other leading investors are betting that the next big online education company will come out of Europe.

It’s probably been a while since you went to uni or college, but we can all relate to the selection process. “Do they have this? Is there a course on this? Unibuddy helps higher education admissions, enrollment, marketing and recruitment teams

After raising 8.3M PowerZ, both an edtech startup and a video game studio, will continue with their ambitious goal — When you look further down the roadmap, PowerZ has some radically ambitious goals. Freund believes that educational games will become mainstream really quickly. However, many companies don’t want to develop this kind of stuff because screens are bad for kids.. Let's see how this will play out!

Content is no longer king --> cohorts are

We’re in a post-content age. It used to be that original educational content was scarce. Today, however, educational content is cheap and abundant on YouTube, in newsletters, on blogs, and on social media. So what's unique now? It's who you're learning with: Cohorts.

As the founder of Maven, the first platform for cohort based courses, Wes Kao is maybe a bit biased. But she has some fair points when stating that the future of cohort based learning will be bright.

"Cohort based learning is all about active- and hands on learning, which has been shown to be quite effective in this Harvard study. Instead of watching videos on your own you will do and try it yourself, together with peers.

And it's not just the effect of active learning. Research has borne out the effects of collaboration. Dr. Lori Breslow, found that edX students who collaborated with a fellow student in completing course material scored nearly 3 points higher, on average, than those working solo."

Who will enable the ultimate learning community

On Deck is where top talent comes to accelerate their ideas and careers, surrounded by a world-class community.

Be on Deck, founded in 2016, has been built around the same proposition of cohort-based learning. It raised 20M in march of this year and it is entirely focused on creating the ultimate communities of talented people. This leaves us to the question: will it be a community only for a selective few?

Be on deck proved me wrong and that's exactly what makes it so interesting. "During the pandemic they showed that they could scale community, become online first, be profitably (can't verify it though) and build out a platform from where it can launch new products. Be on Deck is becoming an ecosystem on it's own."

I'm very curious which Dutch and European examples are following or doing something similar.

Feedback

So there you have it! Up to date on a couple of the latest Edtech trends and headlines. What should we include more of next time? If you have any feedback about this newsletter, let me know. We want to create a newsletter that is really helpful for you and your colleagues. Your feedback + news updates will make that possible.

Have a nice weekend!

Roel