☀️ Our January Update: The Annual European Edtech Funding Report is out!
Dear friends,
Happy 2025 – already coming to the end of January, we hope you’ve all had a good start to the New Year!
We are super excited to have published our Brighteye European Edtech Funding Report 2025 today, after a busy week hosting and attending events in London around Bett last week. You can find more details on both below ⬇️!
We also have some other updates including:
Selected News from the Portfolio – LabLabee’s KAUST and AWS partnerships
Insights – A new Anonymous Exit interview is out
Events – European Edtech Funding Report 2025 Launch Event
We hope you’ll enjoy!
Best,
The Brighteye Team
📣 SELECTED NEWS FROM THE PORTFOLIO
🤝 New LabLabee Partnerships
We’re impressed to hear that LabLabee has partnered with KAUST (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology) to accelerate 5G skills development for researchers.
And on Partnerships, the LabLabee team also recently shared that they have officially joined the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace! The partnership empowers businesses to seamlessly access our portfolio company’s hands-on enablement platform using their existing AWS contracts and credits, making your journey to upskilling teams easier!
📰 Closing the Cybersecurity Skills gap – HTB editorial
The UK faces a critical shortage of skilled professionals, especially in cybersecurity. In this Information Security Buzz story, Haris Pylarinos, CEO and Co-Founder at our portco Hack The Box shares his thoughts on the current talent landscape and offers insights on how the skills gap can be addressed — together as an industry. If you are a UK-based cyber professional, what do you think are the key steps to bridge the talent gap?
🔎 INSIGHTS
💥 Just landed - the European Edtech Funding Report
Like every January, we are thrilled to share our European Edtech Funding Report today, introducing data covering our evolving thesis. We hope you will enjoy reading the full report here – below are some of the main headlines.
• Global Edtech funding and deal count rises in 2024, relative to 2023
Global Edtech investment rose from $5.6B in 2023 to $6.3B in 2024 - yet more promising, however, is that deal count rose significantly, from 915 transactions in 2023 to 1153 in 2024.
• A sharp rise in the number and portion of deals done under $15M, reflecting a strengthening early ecosystem
Rounds between $1-4M grew from 186 in 2023 to 335 in 2024- similarly, the number of deals in the $4-15M range grew from 120 to 215 in the same period.
• European funding and deal count slows, but a sharp uptick in Q4 suggests this is temporary
European Edtech funding fell from $1.2B in 2023 to $0.8B in 2024, with the resilience shown in 2023 cracking in the first half of the year, before a resurgence in Q4 which we expect to be maintained into 2025.
• Sweden and Italy enter the top 5 European markets for the first time
A promising new entry into the top 5 for Sweden and Italy, in both conventional Edtech and under our broader, new umbrella which incorporates more productivity-related solutions, described in Part 2 of this report. 7 countries are represented in the top 10 most active cities in Europe.
• A wave of productivity and ‘just-in-time’ learning solutions is coming!
As Edtech evolves, we walk through Edtech 2.0, tech that supports people to learn, work and thrive across our ‘value chain of learning’, with the three core pillars of Train, Place and Enhance.
⭐️ Anonymous Exits Pt. 05
Last week we were excited to launch Edition 5 in our Anonymous Exits series. In this interview, we get to learn from a Founder who took their business PUBLIC in North America...
The emerging theme(s):
📢 There’s nothing like the prospect of an IPO to concentrate the mind
🪜 Running a meritocracy and rewarding results pays dividends in the long run
🚇 If you’re in a new field, pay even less attention to competitors
🙇 Founders should ringfence time weekly to be deeply strategic, focusing on key decisions like price, product roadmap, and team structure
Click the image to access the full interview:
💪🏾 Our Sidekick resource hub - ICYMI
Last month, we introduced Sidekick, our new online resource hub. This is just a reminder that you can find loads of content, collated in what we hope is a digestible way:
Articles - every piece of content in one big list
Collections - sub-categories like Marketing or the Why We Invested Series
Reports - all our published reports and research, like the Education in the AI Era Series
You’ll also find a collection of all the Brighteye Insider newsletter from last year.
🎪 EVENTS
📣 European Edtech Funding Report 2025 Launch
Coming up next week, we have a Launch event to celebrate the publication of our above annual Brighteye European Edtech Funding Report. Please sign up now to join us on Tuesday 4 February 2025 for a short presentation of the results, including an update on the evolution in our thesis that we introduce briefly in Part 2 of the report, which considers the data for deals in this space.
☕️ Let’s meet at Techarena Stockholm?
We’ll be checking out the fast-growing Nordic tech event in the Swedish capital on 20-21 February. Izzy and Hege from the Brighteye team would love to catch up with Founders, investors and the wider community, please let us know if you have time for a 🇸🇪 “fika,” or if you have a side event we should attend?
🇬🇧 Bett-week 2025
Last week London was buzzing with Edtech activities, at the Bett Show and on the side. Our highlight was hosting an Edtech Mixer alongside our friends at Owl Ventures, Educapital and Sparkmind on the Wednesday. We also enjoyed taking to the stage both at the Bett Show at ExCeL and at side events being hosted around town. Some pictures of Ben and Izzy on stage, to capture the feeling:
