🍁 Brighteye Ventures - October Update
Dear EdTech friends,
We know that you loyal subscribers are all over the world. Here in London, it is really turning into the colder season. When speaking of the weather. The climate for investing in and growing EdTech businesses, however, is still hot like a summer’s day.
Amazing to see BYJU’S reaching new heights with another record valuation at $18bn, and we’re excited to be part of their journey via BYJU’s $500M acquisition of Brighteye portfolio company Epic! this summer.
We’ve also got a few new investments to share! Here’s a quick list of the headlines for this news update from Brighteye:
Are you raising? We are always looking for exciting startups
3 New Investments Announced
Selected News from the Portfolio
Brighteye Insights – international expansion report
Events – a Baltic visit for our European EdTech Tour
Curated Content – some reads and listens to check out
🌱 LOOKING FOR INVESTMENT?
Just a quick reminder that our core mission is investing in exciting companies in the learning technology space. Are you looking for some growth capital - and support - to grow your business? Let us know, by sharing your deck.
💰INVESTMENT ANNOUNCEMENTS
We have been busy leading and joining new rounds of funding recently, and are happy to share 3 new additions to our Brighteye family:
🆕 StudyStream – $2.1M Pre-Seed Round
The 24/7 live virtual Focus Rooms where you study with the world's most productive community of students recently completed the Y Combinator programme, and closed their $2.1 million SAFE round prior to Demo Day. We are happy to have backed the round alongside YC, Emerge Education, Dunce Capital, and a number of high-profile angels. Read more about the exciting team and platform in this recent interview on TechCrunch.
🆕 Genially - $20M Round
A globally leading interactive content creation platform, has raised $20M aims to accelerate the company's goal to create a global standard in content creation. The investors include US venture capital firms 645 Ventures and Owl Ventures, and European investors such as DN Capital and ourselves, and finally successful entrepreneurs like s16VC and Kahoot! founders.
🆕 Lynx Educate – €1.3M Pre-Seed Round
On completing its first round of funding, Lynx Educate has attracted support from some of the world’s leading education investors, contributing to the €1.3-million round. Lynx is a platform that will provide a broad range of certified and accredited education offerings from leading learning institutions to meet workforce development needs across Europe and the UK. According to some estimates, the European corporate training market is projected to grow by more than US$14 billion over the next five years. The investors include: Rethink Education, Emerge Education, Bisk Ventures, Reach Capital, and ourselves.
📣 SELECTED NEWS FROM THE PORTFOLIO
🏆 Ornikar – wins the trophy in the Trophées des Futures Licornes e-commerce and services category – a coveted prize that the team has all the reason to be proud of. Congrats, we are proud, too!!
🔭 Unistellar has received a US schools grant which allows them to equip a certain number of community colleges with their top of the league eVscopes, in partnership with the SETI Institute.
🔎 BRIGHTEYE INSIGHTS
We are doing a fair bit of insight reports and content that we think, and hope, is relevant and useful for many of you.
🌏 International expansion report - Our most recent report is a big one on international expansion for edtech companies. When, how, where to expand? We did a survey and are proud to present the results interpreted here:
We also followed up with a case study, sitting down with Patricia Matey, VP of International Growth Strategy at Genially, to get her insights on how to expand internationally.
And if this was not enough, we have also further broken down the expansion process into stages and themes to guide when considering and deciding when to internationalise. Including a brand new readiness diagnostic tool to help you establish if you are ready to make the move!!
🎪 EVENTS
🇱🇹 🇱🇻 🇪🇪 A Baltic visit for our European EdTech Tour
This month, on Wednesday 20 October we have a Baltic visit coming up on the Brighteye European EdTech Tour. Join us to hear from Eimantas Bekeza from our portfolio company Memby (Digiklasé), and Tönis Kusmin from 99math on the founder side, and Kai Talas from Sparkmind Ventures and Gabriele Poteliunaite from Change Ventures for the VC view. Please register now, and we’ll share a link for joining the event!
🙋🏼♀️ Ask the EdTech Investors Anything - throwback
We’re happy to share a throwback to the Ask the EdTech Investors Anything that we enjoyed doing at the end of September. As part of Oslo Innovation Week, our Partner Alex Spiro Latsis and Sparkmind Ventures Partner Kai Talas joined forces to give feedback on all things related to growing an edtech business.
✈️ In-person panel at South Summit, Madrid
And this week we enjoyed a real-life trip to Madrid where we hosted a panel on edtech in reskilling and upskilling employees at the South Summit. Thanks to edtech founders Cécile Hazan of YouSchool, Alberto López of Genially, Jorge Moreno of Twenix and Carlos Gonzáles de Villaumbrosia of Product School for sharing your insights. You can watch it here (starting at 8.30 on the timer)
💁 CURATED CONTENT
🎙 Podcast
The Unique EdTech Business Models Coming Out of Europe, with Benoit Wirz - What Students Want
As part of our preparations for Ask the Investors Anything during Oslo Innovation Week, Alex spoke to lifelong learning podcast LØRN.TECH. The podcast has content in both English and Norwegian, and we do of course recommend listening to Alex’ interview.
📑 News/Articles/Reports
TechCrunch ran some of our thoughts around the international expansion work, with Rhys Spence’s piece What we can learn from edtech startups’ expansion efforts in Europe?