🔆 Brighteye Ventures - June: Planning our Digital Edtech Startup Festival
👋🏽 Dear friends,
We hope you are all having a good start to the week!
Having connected with many of you during the last few weeks at South Summit in Spain 🇪🇸, the Brighteye edtech meetup in Berlin 🇩🇪 and during London Edtech Week 🇬🇧, we are grateful for our exchanges and for the continued growth of the Brighteye community. Indeed, this update will land in more than 8k inboxes 📬 – thank you all for subscribing and supporting our activities🙏🏻!
What we heard from many of you is that the challenging macro environment continues to present difficulties and opportunities for European edtech. Certainly, it’s an encouraging sign that large European edtech rounds continue to get done. Congrats to Multiverse, CoachHub and Odilo who collectively announced raises of $484M in the last month, helping to draw attention to the edtech landscape in the FT 📰 (we are also proud to get a mention). Interestingly 2/3 of these companies generate significant revenues from government, which may be more recession-resistant and therefore appealing to investors.
More broadly, however, there is a notable slowdown in overall funding and companies with less momentum are faced with the prospect of cutting to extend runway/achieve profitability, making it more difficult to maintain the growth needed to attract further funding. While new capital is harder to come by, inside rounds and venture debt are becoming more prevalent and will likely fill some of the gap as re-pricing continues across the venture landscape, albeit likely at lower valuations than anticipated 6 months ago. We will have more detail on the current environment in European Edtech funding in our mid-year funding report to be released in July (more details in Insights below).
As usual, we have a round-up of news to share from our fund and portfolio, including:
New investment - Visibly
Selected Portfolio News – positive research results and Lithuania’s Startup of the Year
Insights – preparing the European Edtech Funding Half Year Report
Events – introducing an Edtech operators’ digital learning festival
Curated content – a few handpicked reads and listens
We hope you’ll enjoy!
Best,
The Brighteye Team
💰 NEW INVESTMENT
🆕 Visibly (UK) – We are excited about our recent investment in Visibly, a skills-building and supervision app that motivates field engineers to deliver high quality work without in-person monitoring. The SaaS platform helps field engineers share their experiences and improve their skills thanks to feedback loops. Looking forward to joining Kane McQuintin and team on the journey upwards 🚀!
📣 SELECTED NEWS FROM THE PORTFOLIO
📝 Great research results for TeachFX
A recent large-scale (1,136 teachers) randomised controlled trial study, conducted by professors from Stanford, Harvard, and the University of Maryland analysing one of TeachFX’s insights on teacher uptake of student contributions scientifically and solidly proves how the use continues to see increased efficacy for teachers. The results are remarkable: Teachers who were randomly selected to receive feedback improved their use of uptake by 24% compared to the control group. Students of those teachers reported higher course satisfaction, rated their teachers higher, completed more assignments, and had higher academic achievement in the course than students of teachers in the control group. TeachFX CEO and Co-Founder Jamie Poskin commented: “The fact that, in just a 5-week course, the feedback to teachers affected student outcomes is very powerful.”
🏅 Memby wins Lithuanian Startup of the Year award
Huge congratulations to our portfolio company Memby on winning the Skaitmeninis knygnešys Lithuanian start-up of the year title! The cash prize of €3000, established by the Information Society Development Committee, went to Memby, who are providing live online group lessons for Lithuanian children and providing excellent opportunities to fill knowledge gaps and learn effectively for all Lithuanian students.
🔎 BRIGHTEYE INSIGHTS
🔷 We are getting to the end of June ⛱, meaning that H1 of 2022 is already almost over. That also means the half year update for our Brighteye European Edtech Funding Report is being prepared. It will be launched publicly in the second week of July. For a sneak peek 👀 the week before, please follow us on LinkedIn (or let us know if you already are) and drop us your contacts here.
🔷 We have been thinking a lot around the current situation in global markets, leading us to recently create a “Fundraising in a downturn” guide to hopefully help navigating a little. We are happy to re-share the full guide, covering:
▪️ Current macro situation / public markets
▪️ Private Market & VC impact
▪️ What does this mean for your fundraising and spending strategies in 2022-23?
▪️ How to think about costs & reducing burn (if necessary)
▪️ A few positive things about the current situation
🎪 EVENTS
Introducing the Brighteye Edtech Startup Festival
We are excited to share that we are launching the Brighteye Edtech Startup Festival, a week of digital events designed for Edtech operators, to run on 5-9 September 2022. Each day will focus on a different theme, including People, Marketing & Sales, International Expansion, Impact & ESG and Funding & Governance. We have expert partners joining us on each day, including Sifted, Citi, Behaviour Insights Team, Sana Labs, McKinsey and OECD, with loads more to follow.
👉🏻 Please register here if you would like to be the first to get news on the upcoming Festival events!
Co-chair at London Edtech Week
Last week was London Edtech Week, where we were involved as a co-chair. We really enjoyed hosting the Official Opening Reception alongside AWS and MindCET, as well as a meetup together with our partner project the EdTech Garage – with around 30 early-stage edtech founders and ecosystem members showing up to exchange knowledge and experience, supported by our portco Ironhack’s London Hub 🙏🏻. Brighteye Partner Ben Wirz also hosted a panel at the EdtechX Summit, and a few of our portfolio companies were present with booths and on stage, including sAInaptic and Genially.
💁 CURATED CONTENT
🗞 Interview
Our Principal David Guérin shares some reflections (in French) on Why edtech, the European edtech landscape, our approach to investing in this space, his approach to working in it, the current situation in the market and much more in this EdTech Capital interview.
🎙 Podcast
L’Education au Futur is a French podcast on the future of education. We picked up an episode featuring Lynx Educate’s Lamia Rouai – listen in here!