🌸 Brighteye Ventures – March: How to prepare for an early-stage funding round
Dear friends,
We hope you are all well and safe and happy to see a bit more daylight 🔆 every day!
🌍 In a Europe where we are experiencing heart breaking events, we take some solace in the renewed ability to connect in person, strengthen ties and help one another to build, learn and grow. Over the coming weeks, we’d welcome the chance to catch up with you at BETT in London, START Global in Switzerland and/or ASU+GSV in San Diego. More broadly, we hope that the return to (hopefully) uninterrupted in-person learning paired with the experimentation with online learning experienced over the last two years will enable educators, parents and children to marry the best of both worlds to help address the devastating impact that the last two years have had on learning, particularly for poorer children in the US, the UK, France and across Europe and the rest of the world. We feel privileged to be accompanying great entrepreneurs helping to tackle these issues and look forward to meeting 👋🏽 more of you in the weeks, months and years to come.
💻 In the meantime, we hope you’ll enjoy a little digital update from us, including:
New Investment – our recent investment sAInaptic just launched their new Prime product
Selected news from the portfolio – making it to some attractive performance lists
Insights – our brand new guide to fundraising preparations
Events – please say hi at one of the IRL arenas we’ll be at in the next few months
Curated content – a fascinating brief from Stanford University on AI in the future of learning
Have a great Monday and week!
Best,
The Brighteye Team
💰 NEW INVESTMENT
🆕 sAInaptic - pre-seed
We are happy to share that we recently joined a round of funding raised by sAInaptic - an automated revision, learning, and assessment platform using natural language processing (NLP) technology to mark and give instant feedback on open-ended exam responses. The team just launched their sAInaptic Prime, an interactive web app to independently practice exam-style GCSE Science questions and receive instant and personalised teacher-like feedback, to amplify students' experience of learning, This revision experience can be further enhanced with expert-led masterclasses with sAInaptic Mastery.
📣 SELECTED NEWS FROM THE PORTFOLIO
🇺🇦 Memby supports Ukrainian students
Impressive from Memby who have turned around fast to support Ukrainian students with access to learning. The team has built a native solution, secured funding and partnered with Ukrainian schools that provide teachers – all in 1 week.
Memby has also been named in the EU-Startups 10 skyrocketing Lithuania-based startups to watch in 2022 and beyond – we could not agree more.
🏁 Lynx Educate in GSV Cup Top 20
We are very pleased and proud to learn that Lynx Educate has been chosen as a Top 20 edtech startup to compete in the GSV Cup at the ASU+GSV Summit. Congratulations and good luck to all the finalists!
🎧 Litigate on LegalTinsider
Great to hear LitiGate’s CEO Nimrod Aharon “talk data” in the LegalITInsider’s Start-up corner.
🔎 BRIGHTEYE INSIGHTS
How to prepare a Seed or Series A funding round
We know that raising VC funding can feel like an uphill battle. We want to help level the field. So we created a guide to raising a round, including:
What to nail before you raise 🎯
Timelines 🕐
Approaching funds❓
Your materials, inc. deck 📝
Typical process 🤔
Brighteye’s European Corporate Learning Survey 2022 - a few minutes?
We are putting together a corporate learning study📃, and to get valuable results we need a little help to get the data collected🙏🏻. We know your time is precious, so we’ve made it quick and easy, less than 20 questions, lots of multiple choice and limited text required. It should be done in 6-8 minutes, you can find it here. All responses are anonymous. Thanks in advance.
🎪 EVENTS
This week we are pleased to be joining a couple of panels on the BETT Futures stage in London. On Thursday 24 March there is a conversation on the European Edtech Landscape, and on Friday we’re looking forward to offering feedback to some promising startups on their pitches.
🐢 Together with our partners The EdTech Garage and Dealroom we are doing a digital walkthrough of the Edtech platform launched at the end of last year. Join Carla from Dealroom for insights on how to make the best use of the platform on Thursday 31 March at 3pm BST.
Quite a few of our portfolio companies will be at ASU + GSV in early April 🇺🇸, as will our Partner Benoit Wirz – please reach out if you want to catch up 👋🏽 with Lynx Educate, Zen Educate, Skiller Whale, Rosalyn, Ironhack and more.
💁 CURATED CONTENT
📑 News/Articles/Reports
We were happy to see Brighteye Partner Alex Spiro Latsis featured in this Stanford University brief, where Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) presents a cross-section of key research that's reimagining the future of education and learning.
🎙 Podcast
We came across the En Clave Startup podcast myconomy as our portfolio company Twenix CEO Jorge Moreno was a guest. Well worth a listen, for the Spanish 🇪🇸 speakers out there.