🍂 Brighteye - October: We are hiring
👋🏽 Dear friends,
We are feeling optimistic this October 🔆. Why? Our team is growing, for one 🚀 and we are excited about hiring an Associate at our London 🇬🇧 office. The open role is a terrific partner-track opportunity to join the most active edtech-focused VC fund in Europe. We're looking for someone with a deep commitment to improving the experience of learning and education to join our collaborative team. 🙋🏽🙋🏼♀️ Know anyone who might be interested?
We are investing, too, with updates on three new rounds to share. And this newsletter is about to reach 9000 subscribers. Things are looking up!
Enjoy the rest of October and our update, which includes:
Investment Updates – LabLabee, La Solive and TeachFX
Selected Portfolio News - Ribbon Education and fast-growing Spanish startups
Insights – The Evolution of Edtech, a new report by Dealroom and us
Events – revisit all the Edtech Startup Festival action and see you at EdtechNext
Talent wanted – some of our portfolio companies are hiring, too
Curated Content – a small selection of what we like to read and listen to
Best,
The Brighteye Team
💰 INVESTMENT UPDATES
🆕 LabLabee – €1.4M Pre-Seed
We led the €1.4m round, with our friends at Accel, Kima Ventures and e& capital (the investment pillar of e&) participating, alongside a group of notable business angels. We are fired up to be part of the LabLabee journey to help train new and experienced engineers for the telco cloud market, which is currently undergoing a massive transformation. Check out their brand-new video here!
🆕 La Solive – €1.5M Pre-Seed
This French startup provides a training platform for technical operators who are looking to reskill, upskill or pivot their careers in the energy renovation sector in both professional (B2B) and personal (B2C) contexts. We are proud to be participating in the €1.5M pre-seed round with Evolem and a long list of top-notch BAs. It is a joy to join Ariane Komorn and Côme de Cossé Brissac, the one-of-a-kind founders, as they are playing a critical role in a pressing environmental issue: reducing CO2 emissions 🌱.
🆕 TeachFX - $10M Series A
TeachFX – who provides an AI-powered app that records teachers’ lessons and gives them personalised feedback – just announced their $10M round. They have an incredible impact in classrooms, and, increasingly, in online learning. We are excited to be re-investing in them in this next chapter of growth 🚀🌱 alongside Reach Capital, Osage Venture Partners and Pearson. Read the full story as covered by Forbes here.
🙋🏽 Who else is raising?
We are always keen to learn about promising edtechs out there. Know a founder we totally have to meet? Please let us know, by emailing Hannes at ha@brighteyevc.com or share your deck now!
📣 SELECTED NEWS FROM THE PORTFOLIO
📰 Ribbon Education grabs the headlines
Brilliant to see Ribbon Education named top 23 top promising edtech companies according to VC on Business Insider – well done, team. The New York-based company have also been featured by Edtech Insiders, with Alex Sarlin speaking about Scaling Student Success with Co-Founders Lisa Jiang and Joe Burgess.
🔥 Fast-growing Spanish portcos
Amazing to see two of our portfolio companies among the 10 fastest-growing startups in Spain this year, according to TicPymes (in Spanish). Huge congrats to The Power Business School and Genially – you make us proud.
🔎 INSIGHTS
📖 The Evolution of Edtech
We recently published a report with Dealroom - The evolution of Edtech: Activity in private and public markets. The report sought to understand how markets have evolved in recent years and to contextualise what we’ve seen so far in 2022
Headlines include:
💪 VC funding cooling off but early-stage maintains signs of resilience
📈 M&A activity in 2022 surpassed 2020 levels after just 9 months
It made it to TechCrunch, too, where we are suggesting it will be a second boom in edtech, as our industry is still only in its infancy.
🎪 EVENTS
📽 Edtech Startup Festival – the recordings
We are still buzzing from the Edtech Startup Festival 2022. Thanks to all who signed up for one or more of the 12 digital sessions across the 5 days. We learned a lot from all our expert contributors, close to 50 in total. If you would like to revisit, or missed any of the action, the recordings are all available now:
Day 1: People
Session 1 – Sourcing Talent (WTW, RocketX, Tech Nation, Atom Learning)
Session 2 – Company Culture (Sana Labs, Framework)
Day 2: Marketing, Sales & Comms
Session 1 – Strategies (GrowthTribe, CoachHub, Edtech Insiders, Passionfruit, Google for Startups)
Session 2 – Building profile (Burlington, iconoClass, Genially)
Day 3: International Expansion
Session 1 – When & Where (McKinsey, OECD, Sdui, Le Wagon)
Session 2 – How (Tech Nation, On Deck, Zen Educate, RocketX, StartED)
Session 3 – Legal Ask Me Anything (Cooley)
Day 4: ESG, Impact & Evidence
Session 1 – Measuring impact (Educate Ventures Research, Babbel, Bethnal Green Ventures, sAInaptic, Rethink Education)
Session 2 – Behavioural Insights (The Behavioural Insights Team, duolingo, StudyStream, TeachFX, Edtech Insiders)
Day 5: Funding & Governance
Session 1 – Fundraising and Board Management (Brighteye, EY Parthenon, We Are Human, La Solive, 10Digits)
Session 2 – Market Data & Valuations (Citi, dealroom, GoStudent)
Session 3 – Investor Ask Me Anything (Owl Ventures, Google for Startups, Brighteye, Sifted)
🧳 Some real-life events done and coming up
In recent weeks we have been to TechBBQ, Oslo Innovation Week, EDUtech Europe in person. It’s been great, and we are happy to have a few more coming up. We hope to see you in Bielefeld, Germany, for EdtechNext on 24-26 October, and in Helsinki for Slush on 17-18 November and XcitED on 18 November.
With our partner project the EdTech Garage we recently did a real-life meetup in Paris, co-hosted by Edtech France. 30 people showed up to network, meet new connections and learn from each other. Early-stage European edtech looking for a network of like-minded people? Check out the EdTech Garage. And, we’re doing another meetup, this time in London in collaboration with UCL Edtech Labs, on Wednesday 12 October. You can sign up here!
From the Paris EdTech Garage Meetup
💪🏻 TALENT WANTED
A few job openings from our portfolio – maybe they are looking for you?
La Solive - City Manager Nantes – Talent Acquisition Manager – Learning Product Manager
Oneday - Head of Product
💁 CURATED CONTENT
✉️ Newsletter
The EdTech Edge is a new weekly newsletter brought to you by Hannes Aichmayr. Our Associate offers his take on all things edtech, startups and venture capital
🗞 Articles
Our friends at Reach Capital have published a K12 Impact Report, which tells the story of tech adoption in classrooms in the US in a comprehensive way
We also found Higher Ed Dive’s article on OPMs interesting, looking into OPMs having a rocky time and asking if “a ‘culling of the herd’ is next”.
🎙 Podcasts
The EdTech Garage has kicked off Series 2 of its Edtech Founders podcast, now with a focus on Angel investment. Melody Lang from MPA Education is the first to share her insights – you can hear her here!
European edtech profile Svenia Busson just launched a brand-new podcast. The Impact 10x conversations are focused on supporting impact-driven entrepreneurs to understand the world of impact investing. Episode 1 features Willemijn Verloop, Founding Partner at Rubio Impact Ventures.