🌿 Brighteye Ventures – May: The State of Edtech Marketing 2022
👋🏽 Dear friends,
Happy May, already, we hope you are all well!
As we emerge (touch wood🪵) from the pandemic, it seems like a return to “normal” life also means a new reality in the tech startup world. Valuations of publicly traded tech companies in the US have been dropping steadily since November, investment in later stage startups has slowed and IPO volume has also decelerated dramatically. Sifted has looked into how it’s shaping up (or down) in Europe and the impact the slowdown has on private markets and VC funding. Spoiler alert: tech valuations are falling here, too.
Are we seeing this trend in edtech as well? Or can we keep up with the funding pace 🔥 of 2021? The short answer is that edtech is in no way immune from global trends and we expect to see them reflected in our half year European Edtech Funding Report update, when we’ll dive into the numbers and share more details - so watch this space 👀.
In the meantime we’ll stay focused on the fundamentals. Most people, it’s said, overestimate what can change in a year and underestimate what can change in ten years. While some of the changes we saw during the pandemic were transitory, education technology is a vastly under-invested sector, and demand for better learning and talent solutions remains strong. We believe this is a secular, not a cyclical trend, and we continue to seek out 🔎 and support founders building into this trend because the rewards are considerable for entrepreneurs, investors, educators and learners alike.
So, at Brighteye we have kept busy with new investments (a few still in stealth mode) and much more, and we hope you’ll enjoy our update, including:
New investment – welcome Oneday
Selected news from the portfolio – Hack The Box Academy, iconoClass UK launch
Insights – The State of Edtech Marketing 2022, How to structure your DEI and How to build a Customer Success Team
Events – see you at South Summit Madrid and London Edtech Week?
Curated content – our picks of recent reads and listens
Have a great day!
Best,
The Brighteye Team
💰 NEW INVESTMENT
🆕 Oneday – £2.5M seed
We are made up to share our investment in Oneday - the Edtech platform helping aspiring entrepreneurs turn their passion into a business through expert-led coaching, community & content. The talented team recently launched with a £2.5 million seed round that we are proud to have lead together with Outward VC. Read more on Tech.eu!
📣 SELECTED NEWS FROM THE PORTFOLIO
📜 Hack The Box introduced their HTB Academy Certifications - designed to provide job proficiency on various cybersecurity roles, starting with the first, ever, Bug Bounty Hunter certification (aka CBBH)! Going forward, each one of HTB’s job-role paths will provide a certification. Are you ready to put your skills on paper?
🇬🇧 iconoClass - the French bootcamp for sales and business development has launched in the UK and are looking at exciting times ahead accepting sign-ups to fast-tracks students to jobs in tech. 🗞 Read more on UK Tech News! And also a big congrats to iconoClass CEO and Founder Marie Taquet on being named on the French Forbes 30 under 30 list, well done, well deserved.
⌚️ LitiGate - How much impact can an AI-powered litigation platform have on the everyday work of lawyers? In a Woman vs Machine battle, our portfolio company LitiGate compared the work of two lawyers, one using their platform and one working manually. The results show 90% time saving with the platform and nearly 25% more accuracy in identifying the facts and key issues in the case. Impressive!
🥇 Rounding off with an award – we’re proud of Capeesh-CEO and Co-founder Marie Jacobsen Lauvås, who received the Young Innovator Award at Trondheim Tech Port (in Norwegian)
🔎 BRIGHTEYE INSIGHTS
We’ve been diving into a few exciting topics lately and are happy to share our 4th annual State of Edtech Marketing report and two new guides – on structuring your approach to DEI and how to build a customer success team:
📍 The State of Edtech Marketing 2022
The 4th edition of our State of Edtech Marketing report dives into the insights of 40+ Edtech marketing specialists based across Europe, providing a snapshot of the strategies that EdTech companies have actioned in 2021.
🧭 How to structure your approach to diversity, equity and inclusion
Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) is rightly a priority considered increasingly early in companies’ journeys. Whether it’s the make-up of the advisory board, the earliest employees or the approaches made to customers, DEI should be a central consideration. We have put together this guide to help structuring your approach to DEI, split into hiring, culture, measurement and 10 questions to consider in your approach.
♦️ How to build a customer success team
You know you’ll want to build a team that helps customers with their onboarding and queries throughout their lifecycle, whether you operate B2C, B2B, or a combination of both. But before you can address customer success (CSX), you need to know what makes a customer “successful.” This guide can help on how to build a customer success function and team, including team remits and how to approach measuring success will help you understand the levers that you can and need to pull to enhance their likelihood of success.
🎸 Finally, a quick reminder of the EdTech Garage, the network for and by early-stage European edtech founders, that we are partnering in running. Since the launch in February, near 60 talented founders have signed up and are regularly sharing challenges and experience – there is room for more great minds and startups!
🎪 EVENTS
We have been thrilled to host a couple of in real life events lately, celebrating 🎈 the move into our Notting Hill office with a housewarming in London and hanging out with portfolio and other friends in Paris.
Coming up, we will be at the South Summit in Madrid 🇪🇸 in early June – please reach out if you’ll be there! And later the same month we will be well involved in London Edtech Week 🇬🇧 as co-chair and including hosting several events during the week. More details to come shortly on that!
💁 CURATED CONTENT
🎙 Podcasts
Code Story is a podcast featuring the human stories of tech leaders, reflecting the roads they travelled and the products they created. Check out their chat with Co-Founder and CEO Hywel Carver from our portfolio company Skiller Whale.
Our friends at Zanichelli Venture are doing are series of founder interviews in their Sights on EdTech. We picked a link to the one they did with our portfolio member TeachFXs Founder and CEO Jamie Poskin.
＠ Newsletter
This Week in Edtech is a weekly update on all things edtech from Monique Malcolm-Hay – we’ve just signed up, and we like it!
📑 Blogs
Not just one blog, but a list of no less than “75 Super EdTech Blogs to Follow” by Eric Curts on his Control Alt Achieve blog is worth checking out to pick your favourites.