🎬 Brighteye Ventures - September: All set for our Festival
🍂 Hello friends,
Back to School, Back to Work – Happy September, all!
We are indeed back, with a boom💥: Brighteye's Edtech Startup Festival! The zoom stages are all set for our 5 days of Edtech Startup fun. That’s next week - for now ☕️ grab a coffee and enjoy our little round of updates:
Investment Update - 🆕 Fundamental VR raises $20M + 2 🆕 investments
Selected Portfolio News – well represented on “best of-lists”
Support and Insights – 🆕 Office Hours Format + 🆕 Learning for over 50s Market Map (15+ companies!)
Events – the Edtech Startup Festival is on next week
Talent Wanted - our new portfolio companies’ job opportunities section
Curated content – what we’ve listened to and read recently
Thanks for joining us - let’s dive in!
The Brighteye Team
💰 INVESTMENT UPDATE
🚀 Fundamental VR (UK) raised $20M
Our portco Fundamental VR recently announced that they have raised an additional $20 million to dramatically accelerate medical skill transfer and increase surgical proficiency through its world-leading medical simulation platform, Fundamental Surgery. The transaction was led by EQT Life Sciences (investing from the LSP Health Economics Fund 2), and joined by prior investors Downing Ventures, Tern Plc and Sana Kliniken. The new investment follows a Series A round that Brighteye were part of in October 2019 and brings the company’s total funding to over $30 million.
🚀 +2️⃣ new investments that will be announced in the next few weeks. Stay tuned!
🙋🏽 Who else is raising?
Brighteye backs bold edtech founders. The market may have slowed down, but we are still always keen to learn about promising edtechs out there. Know a founder we simply have to meet? Please let us know, by emailing Hannes at ha@brighteyevc.com!
📣 SELECTED NEWS FROM THE PORTFOLIO
🔍 Portfolio well represented on Top 100 Edtechs to Watch
It’s great to see that 5️⃣ of our portfolio companies made it to the Dealroom Top 100 Edtechs to Watch list, based on Dealroom Signal data. Congrats to Skiller Whale, Zen Educate, Hack The Box, Genially and Ornikar – you all make us proud.
💥 Great listing for iconoClass UK
Excellent news for iconoClass to be named among the Evening Standard’s UK’s Top 10 higher education courses to help you reach your career goals. Exciting times ahead, too, as a new London cohort is about to embark on their journey with the sales and business training platform this September.
🥇 Epic! named “Best for Kids”
We were also proud to see Epic! voted “Best for Kids” by Wired in their Best Ebook Subscription Services selection – well done!
🔎 SUPPORT & INSIGHTS
🎧 New Honest Feedback Format
We launched our Honest Feedback Office Hours last year as part of our commitment to help the European edtech community flourish 🌻.
We have had the pleasure of speaking to a LOT of great founders so far and realised that we could help even more on a monthly basis thanks to a NEW asynchronous format. You submit your question (text/video/audio format, it’s up to you) and we will send a short audio message offering an answer. Easy, right?
How it works:
Find more info and get your burning VC questions across now🔥, to hear back from our investment team on what to keep an eye on when growing your edtech business.
🆕 Learning for the over 50s: Untapped opportunity in Europe?
We totally believe so, and in this market map we have lined up a few reasons why, how we understand the early players and a map of them, and where we believe these opportunities are – with the hope of investing in the near future…
🎪 EVENTS
📹 Brighteye Edtech Startup Festival
We are in total Festival mode 🎈for our upcoming Edtech Startup events next week. 430 people have signed up so far, for the 12 digital sessions on five main topics across the five days of 5-9 September. Not one of them? It’s not too late, you can still sign up ✍🏽.
🧳 We also have a few real-life events coming up in September:
🇩🇰 Tech BBQ Copenhagen
Firstly we’ll pack our bags and head to Copenhagen for TechBBQ. We’re hosting a Garden Session of Ask the Edtech Investors Anything on Wednesday 14 September – get your questions ready for Hannes Aichmayr from Brighteye and Kai Talas from Sparkmind, all moderated by Jonathan Viner of 10Digits & Nordic Edtech News. Join us in the Blue Garden Tent at 14.20-15.00.
🇳🇴 Oslo Innovation Week
A few weeks later we are heading further North, to co-host an afternoon of Edtech conversations during Oslo Innovation Week with IKT Norge, the Finnish Embassy in Norway and Business Finland. Brighteye is hosting a panel on edtech funding – the general landscape, who gets funding and what do the investors look for – featuring our Partner Ben Wirz, angel investor Anette Kristin Bø Andreassen, Co-Founder and CEO Sari Hulme-Mehtälä of Kide Science (Fi) and Co-Founder and CEO Eirik Wahlstrøm of Ludenso (N). Register now to join us in Oslo on Wednesday 28 September.
💪🏻 TALENT WANTED
Ready for new career challenges? Our Portfolio companies are always looking for talent. We are happy to highlight 🔦 a couple of openings for now and will bring more in the months to come:
Hack The Box - Senior Product Marketing Manager (remote)
Twenix - Sales Manager Spain (text in Spanish)
Zen Educate – VP of People and Talent (London/hybrid)
💁 CURATED CONTENT
🗞 Articles
Hywel Carver, Co-Founder and CEO at Skiller Whale has shared The Tech Strategy that Thrives in a Recession on Medium - his approach to navigating a time of famine when a feast was expected in the current tech market downturn in hopes it may help others – we think it certainly does help, thanks Hywel.
Forbes’ Derek Newton spoke to Education Investor Atin Batra of 27V on Being Bullish on Education – you can read Batra’s view of the market here.
🎙 Podcasts
Check out the Game, set, Matchup podcast by Findr, featuring our portfolio company Ironhack’s UK Growth Manager Gabriel Pizzolante - talking about building partnerships and sharing tips and experience.
We recently came across About Edtech Tuesdays - an interview podcast about innovation, learning culture and technologies for learning. Ewa Hutmacher talks to innovators, investors, thinkers and doers changing the status quo (conversations in English and Swedish).