🗞Brighteye Ventures - November Update
🍂 Happy Tuesday edtech friends,
We hope you have all stocked up on candles🕯, hot chocolate ☕️ and warm coats 🧥 and are enjoying November so far!
As 2021, a year on pace for a record $20B invested in edtech, draws to a close and kids in the developed world are largely back in school, we are focused on the underlying trends creating opportunities for innovation in the space💡. One driving force is the global skills gap which continues to grow. Recent stories on CNN and on EdSource reminded us that “nearly half of American companies say they are short on skilled workers” even while college enrolment is down, and community colleges, which provides the bulk of vocational training in the US, has seen dramatic drops in enrolment. In the state of California alone community college enrolment is down almost 15% from the previous year📉. The situation is alarming, and the US examples are just but a small part of the lost potential that exists on a global scale. That said, because we know that technology driven companies can help address this gap we are excited to partner with the companies in our portfolio that are doing so, and are always open to learn about more solutions in this space!
Some news from portfolio companies and our own activities - headlines include:
Selected News from the Portfolio – Genially winning the EdtechX Award for Innovation and Growth
Brighteye Insights – International expansion case study with Felix Ohswald at GoStudent
Events – The Brighteye European Edtrech Tour arrives in Italy
Curated Content – we recommend a good listen
Enjoy!
The Brighteye Team
📣 SELECTED NEWS FROM THE PORTFOLIO
🏅Genially wins EdtechX Award
We’re impressed and proud of our portfolio member Genially for winning the Innovation and Growth category at the EdtechX Award 2021🎉. The awards recognise the fastest growing and most innovative startups in the global edtech industry. Congratulations, team!
🤩 Supermood has a new look
The French platform for employee engagement, feedback and collaboration has had a makeover and rebranding – looking very good!
🎉 Outstanding design award for Unistellar
Congratulations also to Unistellar on the great achievement of being awarded a CES Innovation Awards for their eVscope 2, the world’s most powerful digital telescope for consumers, in the Digital Imaging/Photography category. The Awards is an annual competition honouring outstanding design and engineering in consumer technology products.
🚀 Our portfolio companies are growing and recruiting fast. View current opportunities here:
🔎 BRIGHTEYE INSIGHTS
🌍 How to expand internationally
In our last update we shared our big International Expansion report: Budgets, barriers and blueprints. Following up, we sat down with Felix Ohswald, CEO and Co-Founder at GoStudent and Brighteye Specialist Advisor, for a case study on his high-level perspectives on international expansion 🌍. GoStudent, Europe's largest tutoring company, continues to rapidly expand to new markets after becoming Europe's first Edtech unicorn🦄 in June 2021!
🚪 How to build an effective onboarding process
In response to queries on how to best onboard new team members, an incredibly important subject, we delved into the best practice and collated our thoughts. This is the next phase in our series of articles on People teams, following pieces on recruitment and culture.
🎪 EVENTS
🇮🇹 Ciao Italia
The Brighteye European Edtech Tour arrives in Italy this month, on Thursday 18 November. We’ll be diving into fundraising for Italian edtechs, and you are all welcome to learn from the journeys of Riccarda Zezza, Founder and CEO at Lifeed, and Andrea Chirolli, Co-Founder and CEO at Futura, as well as get the VC view on this region from Enrico Polli, Director at Zanichelli Venture, and Giuseppe Donvito, Partner at P101. 🎤All hosted by Brighteye Partner Alex Spiro Latsis.
🎞 Our last Tour stop was in the Baltics and it can be watched here 🇱🇻🇱🇹🇪🇪!
✈️ Real trips coming up
We’re slowly starting to travel for real again, too, and will be at Slush in Helsinki 1-2 December – as well as at the edtech arm XcitED on 30 November. 👋🏽 Please let us know if you are planning to be there and let’s catch up!
💁 CURATED CONTENT
🎙 Podcast
Our Partner Ben Wirz was interviews on our newly discovered What Students Want Podcast, talking to Andreas Marinopoulos about The Unique EdTech Business Models Coming Out of Europe.