📣🏖️ Brighteye Q2 2020 Update

Jul 28

Hi folks,

We hope you are all keeping healthy!

We are happy share our Q2 update (a few days late 😅). We expect that, like us, many of you will get some well deserved time off over the next few weeks and hope that you can find some things to kick off summer reading below! 🌴

First, we wanted to thank all of the founders who recommended Alex & Ben (Brighteye Partners) for the Tech Crunch List of 400 VC investors globally recommended by founders to founders. We appreciate you! 🙏

Access List

🔥 NEW INVESTMENT

We are excited to announce a new investment:

We wanted to welcome Tandem, to the Brighteye family. Founders Arnd and Tobias have built Tandem into the global leader in peer to peer language learning with over 10m members. Innovative and effective, Tandem connects fluent speakers with learners through a sophisticated community platform that keeps users motivated about learning from one another. Having witnessed the company grow by 2X over the last few months, we were honoured to lead Tandem's £4.5m Series A and are excited for what’s next!

🆕 SELECTED PORTFOLIO UPDATES

The EdTech industry has seen unprecedented momentum as a result of COVID which saw 90% of students across the globe impacted, many of whom turned to online education resulting in growth and opportunity across the board. Funding has continued to grow quickly across the EdTech space in general and the Brighteye portfolio: 11/17 companies secured funding in the last 6 months, including Ironhack who raised a Series B from Creas and existing investors Brighteye and JME. 💸

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Selected individual highlights of portfolio

Epic! has reached an amazing 1 billion books read to date with a presence in over 90% of all US elementary schools.
Aula partnered with Wonkhe to host a virtual conference on universities' transition to online with over 2K+ attendees and launched learning-design-as-a-service to help universities easily transition individual classes/modules from offline to their digital experience platform which is optimized for blended learning.
Unistellar has delivered 1,000 telescopes in the EU and US so far (and counting) and is starting to leverage its community with exciting new features.
Ironhack launched Ironhack Remote, which provides a live online learning experience for students so they can kickstart their career in tech from the convenience and safety of their home.
YesChef pre-launched its online cooking platform with 6 world renown chefs, including Chef José Andres, Chef Nancy Silverton, Chef Dario Cecchini, among others.

Open Roles @ Portfolio Companies

🦠 EDTECH COVID-19 SENTIMENT SURVEY

67 EdTech entrepreneurs globally shared their thoughts in April and thanks to their inputs, we put together a report with the goal to help the EdTech community with data that can be useful on how best to navigate these unpredictable times and make key decisions.

Download Report

💁 CURATED CONTENT

While being stuck at home and making investments, we have been busy reading and listening to new content. Here is a short list of curated content.

🎙 Podcasts

How Innovation Works (Part 1, Part 2) by Naval and Matt Ridley
We were featured in Dans la tête d’un VC by JC Kurdali and Runway Series by Raphael Grieco (in French 🇫🇷). (Thanks again @JC and @Raph for the opportunity!)