🎄Brighteye Ventures - December: New edtech data platform
♥️ Happy December, friends!
As the season greetings are coming in (and going out)🎁, so are the 2021 reports and 2022 forecasts🔮. It could not be more exciting times.
Edtech investment growth is set to triple in 2021 🚀 from the already record-breaking 2020-numbers (ending at $711m). This is completely in line with the tripled total growth in overall tech investment for Europe, as published by our friends at Atomico and partners in their State of European Tech 2021 last week.
At Brighteye we are also preparing our own European Edtech Funding 2021 update and 2022 predictions, due for publication in late January. Moving forward, it will be easier to keep on top of the data, and the European edtech landscape in general, as we were this week proud to launch a collaboration with Dealroom on a brand new edtech platform🌟💡. Among other things, we hope that this platform will help founders to more easily identify sources for funding - like the most active funders in European edtech:
🗞 Loads of other news to share as we are closing in on the year end, too.
New investments – welcoming Twenix, Marmelade and Create Academy to our portfolio
Selected News from the Portfolio – grants, career path events and awards
Brighteye Insights – the brand new Brighteye x Dealroom Edtech platform, professional development and entrepreneur education market map, a guide to decide where to expand, and a “Free 5-day email VC course” (that features a cheesy 80s theme!).
Events – recap of The Brighteye European Edtech Tour Italy
Curated Content – we recommend some reads and listens for the festive season and beyond
🌟 We wish you all a peaceful and safe holiday season, and can’t wait to see you again in 2022!
Best,
The Brighteye Team
💰 NEW INVESTMENTS
It’s great to share the news of three exciting investments for our fund this time.
🆕 Marmelade (France) - €2.6m round
We’re thrilled to be backing Marmelade, a mobile app that simplifies health and safety compliance training in highly regulated industries such as construction, logistics and energy. We’re happy to be investing alongside The Secret Fund and Aster whose deep experience in the industry will help the company grow.
🆕 Twenix (Spain) - €2m round
We’re also happy to announce our investment in Twenix, a business English learning platform for SMBs that offers individual 1:1 English classes, tailored to companies' and learners' needs in a simple and fun way. This sees us once again investing alongside JME Ventures, one of Spain’s leading early stage investors. The news was well covered by Spanish El Referente.
🆕 Create Academy (UK) - £1.5m round
Create Academy is one of the UK’s fastest growing and most well-loved creative learning platforms. We are delighted to be part of their recent £1.5 million new external funding round, and even more excited about the journey ahead as the team continues to work with the best creative talent in their fields, to produce joyful learning experiences that inspire and educate, in the lifestyle content genres of Home/ Interiors, Food, Garden/Floristry and Decorative Arts/Craft.
📣 SELECTED NEWS FROM THE PORTFOLIO
🧩 Ironhack Career Path events
Ironhack just launched their UK career paths events - a series of sessions with real life experts in different tech fields who will share their experience, knowledge and professional journey that took them to where they are. The sessions will cover a selection of career paths you can take, covering different roles and the potential of learning the skills. There will also be tips on how to get started, and time for all your questions. Check out all events here!
🧠 TeachFX grant for online tutoring
Well done TeachFX, for having been awarded a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to adapt their brilliant voice AI technology for the online tutoring context. The Palo Alto-based company is partnering with Cignition, a renowned provider of innovative, data-informed math tutoring programs, to implement the Teach FX educator feedback tool with their tutors.
🥇Tandem prize for innovative marketing approach
Fantastic news from the Tandem marketing team, who won the award for "Influencer Campaign of the Year" at App Promotion Summit for their innovative approach to blend organic and paid content on TikTok. Congratulations!
🔎 BRIGHTEYE INSIGHTS
🎉 Introducing the Brighteye x Dealroom Edtech Platform
This week we are beyond excited about announcing our partnership with Dealroom by launching a new, open-access edtech ecosystem database designed to be the ideal tool to inform and foster engagement between startups, investors, ecosystem builders and other parts of the Edtech ecosystem.
The platform is free to use and catalogues 25,000+ startups, and 13,000 funding rounds, providing global intelligence and trusted insights into edtech startups & scaleups, investors, and beyond across the edtech ecosystem. Brighteye’s sector expertise enabled the creation of a new taxonomy aimed to map how edtech companies are organised.
A short walk through the platform:
🗺 Professional development and entrepreneurship education
We have published an analysis on the professional education landscape, looking into how content, communities and mentoring offers are evolving 💫 It includes a new market map 🗺️, focusing on the structure of the market and our views on the direction of it.
🌍 Deciding where to expand internationally
Have you decided to expand your edtech company, but not yet sure where? In a new guide we walk through 5 steps to help Edtech companies decide where to expand internationally. The guide includes sample scorecards you can tailor to your own business!
Our 5 steps:
1. Understanding your first market business and performance 🧮
2. Modelling a ‘suitable’ market 💭
3. Assessing your market options ⚖️
4. Understanding execution implications 🎬
5. Workshopping and user engagement 🧑🤝🧑
💸 Learn about VC in 5 days, 5min/day!
The 1st FREE email VC course powered by Brighteye.
At Brighteye, we believe in making the mysterious world of VC more accessible and easy to understand for founders, aspiring VCs and anyone in the wider community with an interest in the space. David, our Principal, took a crack at creating a “Free 5-day email course” to help you learn the ropes. It features a cheesy 80s theme to add some fun to the learning process! 😄
The course covers the fundamentals of VC:
Day 1: What is VC 🏗
Day 2: VC portfolio simulation 👩🔬
Day 3: Finding companies 👀
Day 4: Cherry-picking companies 🍒
Day 5: Investing in & working with founders 🤝
🎪 EVENTS
🇮🇹 Grazie Mille, Italia
Our 10th and final stop on the Brighteye European Edtech Tour this year took us to Italy, where we had inspiring conversations on fundraising in Italian edtech with founders Ricarda Zezzi of Lifeed and Andrea Chirolli of Futura, as well as VCs Enrico Poli from Zanichelli Venture and Giuseppe Donvito of P101🙏🏻. Watch it all here:
The Italy visit rounds up the European Edtech Tour for 2021 – thanks a lot to all founders and investors who have joined us on stage and as attendees at our 10 virtual stops. We have them all recorded for you to catch up on: 📹 the Nordics, Spain & Portugal, Germany, France, Greece, the UK, the Netherlands, the Baltics & Italy.
🌱 While you are watching we are busy planning more events, both live and digital, for the year to come!
💁 CURATED CONTENT
As we are slowing down a little for some seasonal celebrations and a bit of time off, we are hoping you will all be able to put heads down and feet up over the next few weeks 🧦. It’s always good to tuck into a refill of inspiration and knowledge, however, so we are happy to suggests a few reads and listens that we like.
🎙 Podcast
Each week, in Entrepreneur Insight, Thomas Reck interviews one of the world's top entrepreneurs to better understand their story and how they got to where they are today. We picked the episode with Felix Ohswald of GoStudent and an expert advisor to Brighteye. There are many more great talks to explore, too!
Sifted – the European startup and tech publication - recently launched their own podcast, well worth checking out!
📑 News/Articles/Reports
We attended Super Venture 2021 in Berlin in November, where Partner Alex Spiro Latsis did a keynote on trends in the edtech industry. He was also interviewed by SuperVenture TV:
TechCrunch ran a story expanding on our professional development and entrepreneurship education insights – The Unbundling of Professional Learning and Entrepreneurship Education, by Rhys Spence, Head of Research at Brighteye
Our new “Free email VC course” (just in case you missed it earlier!).
🗃️ Newsletters
EduTech are organising edtech events around the globe. They also share a lot of insights and inspiration on their EduTech Talks website and newsletter.