🌻 Brighteye Ventures - September Update 🌻
👋 Hi folks,
As we are well into September, we hope you are all charged 🔋 for a busy month and beyond. We sure are!
In this update, we are both looking back at some recent news from the last couple of months, as well as looking a bit ahead. Including:
2 Investment Announcements
We’re hiring 2 new Associates! 💪🏻🚀
2 New Specialist Advisors
New Feedback Programme
Selected Portfolio Updates
Brighteye Insights
Events
Curated Content
Thanks for subscribing and enjoy our update! Please follow us on Brighteye 👋 LinkedIn and 🐦 Twitter.
💰INVESTMENT ANNOUNCEMENTS
🆕 Memby - $1M pre-Seed
We are thrilled to announce our investment in Memby, the first one-to-many digital tutoring platform, connecting students with 'hand-picked' subject experts! We are excited to join the $1M pre-seed round that we co-led with Change Ventures, and look forward to supporting Eimantas Bekėža, Silvestras Stonkus and the brilliant team in building the business and expanding 🚀 beyond Lithuania 🌍. Read the news on Tech.eu here!
🆕 UpHill Health - $4.1M Seed
We are also excited to announce our investment in the UpHill Health $4.1M seed round. The Lisbon-based 🇵🇹 startup develops software to guide clinical decisions and help hospitals adopt evidence-based best practices. We are delighted to support Eduardo Freire Rodrigues and team UpHill as they scale to new geographies 🌍 and continue to develop their product and team. Read more in EU-Startups.
🔍 Keep watching this space, there will be a few new announcements coming soon!
🦸 WE’RE HIRING
The Brighteye team keeps growing 🚀 🌱!
We’re looking for 2 enthusiastic and talented students of the venture business - one Associate to join our team in Paris and one for our London office. The Associates will manage deal sourcing and value added services for Brighteye Ventures.
🙋🏽TWO NEW SPECIALIST ADVISORS
With a growing portfolio, we are excited to share that we have added two more brilliant people to our Specialist Advisory Network to support our portfolio companies.
Alexis Horowitz-Burdick, former MD of LEGO Ventures (and much more!)
💁 NEW EDTECH FEEDBACK PROGRAMME
📣 SELECTED PORTFOLIO UPDATES
⚡️Epic! - $500M Exit to BYJU’S
Our biggest portfolio news this summer was most probably that of Epic! exiting to BYJU’S for $500M. Epic! was the first Brighteye investment back in 2017, and it’s been a joy to be part of this impressive journey.
🎓 The PowerMBA & Harvard partnership + Award
Great news also from the PowerMBA who officially has signed a content partnership with Harvard Business Publishing Education, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Harvard Business School! This means that students taking any of their certifications or master’s programs will have the opportunity to obtain their Harvard ManageMentor® certificate. And the news came only a day after they were the recipients of the Best Business School Award at the VII Premios Tu Economía. Double celebrations🎉
🤝 Unistellar + Nikon
Also on partnerships, Unistellar has announced an industrial partnership with Nikon, that will allow “consumers everywhere to see space in a new light.” Nikon’s skill at embedding high-end tech into popular hobbies such as photography is a natural fit with Unistellar’s vision of making space exploration an adventure everyone can experience 🔭. And this morning, Unistellar launched its new flagship product, the eVscope 2 - worth checking out!
📃 LitiGate launched across Taylor Wessing network
Law firm Taylor Wessing chose LitiGate as their go-to litigation lifecycle platform to support clients with contentious matters, following close collaboration during the testing phase. Now they are rolling out across their network! TW Partner Laurence Lieberman also managed to get BBC coverage for the deep tech tool and how it helps to transform manual tasks and data analysis work!
🔎 BRIGHTEYE INSIGHTS
Over the summer we have published two case studies in a How to Build a People Function series – hopefully of value to all involved in People and HR, in EdTech and beyond.
Recruitment - Ornikar
The first case study and interview was with Ornikar’s Chief People Officer, Jessica Djeziri, on sourcing and hiring talent.
Culture - Aula
For the second case study we spoke to Aula’s COO, Rune Kvist, on developing and maintaining a good Company Culture.
🏫 Back to School - Alastair Land, Harrow School
In our latest video, we sat down with Head Master Alastair Land at Harrow School for a chat about running the school during lockdown, the Harrow Online School, their tech stack and how they govern their digital approach, as well as some hopes for the future! Watch it all here!
🧩 Early-stage support needs?
We are surveying the interest in establishing an early-stage EdTech support network/portal in Europe. A lot is covered by the recently launched European Edtech Alliance, made by and for the different national and regional edtech organisations around Europe. However, talking to a lot of founders in this space we feel that there might be a need for support, advice and connections at an even earlier stage📍. We’re asking for your help to develop our hypothesis, and if there is indeed such a need, how we can provide this support.
If you are an early stage edtech company, we’d love for you to share your feedback in our short survey here? 🙏🏻
🌍 EVENTS
🇳🇱 European EdTech Tour: The Netherlands – international B2B education sales
On Wednesday 22 September we are digitally visiting the Netherlands🇳🇱 to explore what’s cooking in the Dutch edtech landscape. For our founder/CEO conversation, we’ll dig into the topic of selling B2B learning and education internationally across Europe. We are very proud and happy to be joined by Peter van Sabben, CEO and Co-Founder at Growth Tribe/co-founder and board member at Dutch Edtech, and Alice Niezborala, CEO at ProctorExam, recently acquired by Turnitin.
On the investor side for the region we are lucky to get the views of Ilonka Jankovich, Founding Partner at TapTrove Ventures, and Ernst Rustenhoven, Senior Investment Manager at Slingshot Ventures.
All welcome - please register here!
🇬🇧 The UK visit in June
Our previous stop on the Tour was the UK, featuring Zen Education, MyTutor and MyTamarin on the founder/CEO panel and Ibis Capital/EdtechX, ClearlySo and Public for the VC views.
🇳🇴 Ask the EdTech Investors Anything – Oslo Innovation Week
Brighteye Ventures and Sparkmind VC are excited to join forces during Oslo Innovation Week 2021, inviting all edtech founders and friends to a session of Ask The EdTech Investors Anything. Welcome to an informal and accessible way to ask European EdTech VCs anything you want related to growing your learning technology business. You ask, and Partner Alex Spiro Latsis at Brighteye and Partner Kai Talas at Sparkmind will offer honest feedback during the digital hour on Wednesday 29 September.
💁 CURATED CONTENT
🎙 Podcasts
We recently came across What Students Want, by Andreas Marinopoulos, diving into the needs of students of all ages, learning environments, learning experiences and learning science. Tune in!!
📑 News/Articles/Reports
TechCrunch picked up some thoughts around the Brighteye European EdTech Funding 2021 Half Year report, as did Norwegian Shifter.
Tech.eu asked for our views on international growth for European edtech companies, and also featured portfolio company Ironhack in a story in the same Crossing Borders-series.
And recently Brighteye Partner Ben Wirz was speaking to Jonathan Viner for the Nordic Edtech News Interview.
This UK Immersive Tech: VC Investment Report is worth checking out. And we’re happy to see Fundamental VR as one of 10 featured companies, too.
2020 Venture Capital Salary Survey by John Gannon (polled my 18,000+ members).