Education
Edtech entrepreneurs are using their moment in the sun to rethink the structures and impact of nearly every aspect of modern-day learning, from the art of testing to the reality…
Go1 raises $200M at a $1B+ valuation to boost its curated enterprise learning platform
Online learning continues to see a huge boost of attention and use in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and today a startup building tools specifically for enterprises to deliver…
Indonesian edtech startup Gredu raises $4M Series A to keep teachers, parents and students engaged with one another
Many teachers and parents in Indonesia rely on WhatsApp to keep in touch, creating “multiple groups that often become messy and highly ineffective, and result in confusion or lost threads,”…
We are seeing a wave of private companies sweeping across parts of education and training that were previously overseen or funded centrally by governments. This is happening all across the…
Paper gets $100M worth of venture-backed paper for B2B edtech
For edtech startups, it’s always been easier to go direct-to-consumer than it is to sell into school districts. The latter has stodgy and strict sales cycles, while the former has a…
India-based technology startup Salesken.ai has secured an exposed server that was spilling private and sensitive data on one of its customers, Byju’s, an education technology giant and India’s most valuable…
Facebook to target Nigerian learners with educational app Sabee, created by its R&D team
Last fall, Facebook announced it was opening an office in Lagos, Nigeria, which would provide the company with a hub in the region and the first office on the continent…
Vienna’s GoStudent raises $244M at a $1.7B valuation for its online tutor marketplace
Online teaching came into the spotlight for many students and parents in the last year, and today one of the companies that saw a big lift during that rush of…
“If you’re not going to an Ivy League, which is most of the world, you need better support than just going to a website.”
Nexford University lands $10.8M pre-Series A to scale its flexible remote learning platform
Two profound problems face the higher education sector globally — affordability and relevance. Whether you live in Africa, Europe or the U.S., a major reason why people don’t go to…
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Mapping out one edtech company’s $200M bet on lifelong learning
Emeritus plans to acquire iD Tech, a STEM education service for children, which brings a whole different set of customers to its umbrella.
Snowman, the studio behind Alto’s Adventure and others, launches a kids app company, Pok Pok
Snowman, the small studio behind award-winning iOS games Alto’s Adventure, Alto’s Odyssey, Skate City and others, is spinning out a new company, Pok Pok, that will focus on educational children’s…
StuDocu raises $50M as its note-sharing network for college students passes 15M users
Whether learning online or taking a class in person, every student knows all too well how important it is to have good notes from your classes as a key way…
Kahoot acquires Clever, the US-based edtech portal, for up to $500M
Kahoot, the popular Oslo-based edtech company that has built a big business out of gamifiying education and creating a platform for users to build their own learning games, is making…
StudySmarter books $15M for a global ‘personalized learning’ push
More money for the edtech boom: Munich-based StudySmarter, which makes digital tools to help learners of all ages swot up — styling itself as a “lifelong learning platform” — has…
Microsoft’s Reading Progress makes assessing reading levels easier for kids and teachers
Among the many, many tasks required of grade school teachers is that of gauging each student’s reading level, usually by a time-consuming and high-pressure one-on-one examination. Microsoft’s new Reading Progress…
Erase All Kittens raises $1M seed round for Mario-style game which teaches girls to code
Erase All Kittens (EAK) is an edtech startup that created a “Mario-style” web-based game designed for kids aged 8-12. However, the game has a twist: it places an emphasis on…
OpenClassrooms raises $80 million for its online education platform
French startup OpenClassrooms has raised an $80 million Series C funding round led by Lumos Capital Group. The company operates an online education platform in French and English. Users can…
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What the MasterClass effect means for edtech
MasterClass, which sells a subscription to celebrity-taught classes, sits on the cusp of entertainment and education. It offers virtual, yet aspirational learning: an online tennis class with Serena Williams, a cooking session with Gordon Ramsay. While there’s the off chance that an instructor might actually talk to you — it has happened before — the…
Since colleges are failing to prepare students for tech jobs, it’s time to bring back apprenticeships
In the explosion of edtech businesses with new approaches, we are in danger of overlooking an established model that can be adapted to solve these challenges. That model is apprenticeships.
Proctorio sued for using DMCA to take down a student’s critical tweets
A university student is suing exam proctoring software maker Proctorio to “quash a campaign of harassment” against critics of the company, including an accusation that the company misused copyright laws…
Indonesian edtech CoLearn gets $10M Series A led by Alpha Wave Incubation and GSV Ventures
Indonesian startup CoLearn started as a chain of physical tutoring centers and was in the process of shifting to a hybrid offline-online model when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The team…
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Garry Kasparov launches a community-first chess platform
Four years ago, MasterClass, a platform that sells celebrity-taught classes, invited chess legend Garry Kasparov to teach a class. He said yes, but soon realized that creating a message that could satisfy a majority of players was a “struggle throughout the process.” While the class did pretty well, Kasparov found it “a little bit annoying”…
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Outschool is the newest edtech unicorn
Outschool, a marketplace providing small-group, virtual after-school activities for children, has raised a $75 million Series C led by Coatue and Tiger Global Management. TechCrunch first learned of the round from sources familiar with the transaction; the company confirmed the deal to TechCrunch. The new funding values Outschool at $1.3 billion, around four times higher…
As working out goes virtual, Moxie raises $6.3M seed+ round led by Resolute Ventures
With the pandemic sending the planet indoors to work out, the at-home fitness market has boomed. It was only in October last year that three-year-old Future closed $24 million in…
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Nonobvious acquisitions are on my 2021 bingo board
At the end of 2020, I argued that edtech needs to think bigger in order to stay relevant after the pandemic. I urged founders to think less about how to bundle and unbundle lecture experience, and more about how to replace outdated systems and methods with new, tech-powered solutions. In other words, don’t simply put…
Startups have about $1 trillion worth of reasons to love the Biden infrastructure plan
The sweeping infrastructure package put forward today by President Joe Biden comes with a price tag of roughly $2 trillion (and hefty tax hikes), but gives startups and the broader…
Coursera prices IPO at top end of its range in boon to edtech valuations
Coursera, an edtech unicorn, will begin its life today as a public company after pricing its IPO at $33 per share yesterday evening. Using a simple share count, the company’s…
Holberton raises $20M as it pivots to become an edtech SaaS company
Holberton, the education startup that started out as a coding school in San Francisco and today works with partners to run schools in the U.S., Europe, LatAm and Europe, today…
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Y Combinator widens its bet in edtech in latest batch
Y Combinator is slowly growing its stake in education companies, as the sector balloons with newfound demand from remote learners. In its latest batch, the famed accelerator had its highest number of edtech startups yet: 14 companies from around the world, working on everything from teacher monetization to homework apps to ways to train software…
