🏄🏽♀️ Our June Update: Reinvestments in Zen Educate and Visibly
Dear all,
🌿 We hope you are enjoying June, so far!
We’re getting to the end of H1 2024. That went fast ⚡️⚡️. To cap off 6 months packed with activities, we are looking forward to London Edtech Week, beginning on Monday, when we’ll once again co-host the Opening night (details below). Before the summer slow-down, we’d like to give a heads up on the return of the Brighteye Edtech Startup Festival - it’s back on 3-5 September, please save the date 🗓️!
Since our last news update, Team Brighteye held our annual offsite where we were able to reflect on the growth of the Edtech sector since we launched Brighteye in 2017 and on our own growth as a team, and we’re grateful for both! And we had time for some fun, too – you can see a little highlight 🎞️ at the end of the newsletter, which also includes:
Investment Updates – 2 Reinvestment Announcements
Selected News from the Portfolio – Top Jobs, Rankings and Awards
Insights – Edtech opportunities in Greening the Built Environment
Events – Counting Down to London Edtech Week
We hope you will enjoy!
Best,
The Brighteye Team
💰 INVESTMENT UPDATES
🔂 Zen Educate - $37M Series B (Reinvestment)
A big congrats to Zen Educate on securing $37M in a Series B round and acquiring Aquinas Education 🔥. Having joined the online marketplace connecting schools with teachers when leading their $6.5M round in 2019, we are proud and pleased to be part of this latest funding round, led by Round2 Capital Partners.
Zen Educate is addressing 💪🏾 the challenge of growing teacher shortages by automating the process of finding the right teacher at the right time, while saving schools money and paying educators more in the process.
We are incredibly impressed by Slava Kremerman, Oren C. and the now near 300-strong Zen team and can’t wait for what lies ahead 🚀🚀!!
🗞️ Check out what the media said: TechCrunch, Tech Funding News, EU-Startups
🔂 Visibly - €7M (Reinvestment)
We had a great to start the week sharing 📣 the news of Visibly’s recent €7M raise “to rethink regulated training for the infrastructure sector.”
The round was led by Creandum, and alongside other existing investors Seedcamp, Triple Point and prominent Angel investors we are proud and happy to keep supporting the team on this exciting journey. Well done, Kane St Quintin and team 👏 👏!
Visibly’s user-first technology offers workers in the blue- and green-collar industries training that is on-demand, adapts to their individual needs and capabilities, and translates to the world around them.
Our Principal David wrote ✏️ a post on why we are excited to re-invest and keep joining the team on their mission to "give one million blue/green collar workers an education that's useful and enjoyable."
📰 You can see the media coverage on EU-Startups, Tech Funding News, Silicon Canals
📣 SELECTED NEWS FROM THE PORTFOLIO
⚽️ Top Barcelona job for coachbetter co-investor
It’s fun to see fellow coachbetter investor and supporter Hansi Flick take the top job at FC Barcelona’s men’s first team. Meanwhile, Austrian team Sturm Graz has signed with coachbetter to enhance their coaching and talent development. Go team!!
🙌🏼 Zen Educate on Sifted Top 10
In a ranking by tech publication Sifted, we are proud to see Zen Educate listed in the Top 10 fastest growing startups in the UK. Congratulations!
🏆 Two Awards for Shakers at the South Summit
At the recent South Summit in Madrid, our portfolio company Shakers, came away with 2 Awards in the Startup Pitches Final 100 events. They won the category for Future of Work and Talent, as well as in the Grand Finale being named 📈 Most Scalable Startup – for “demonstrating a scalable and promising business model, and its growth potential and market adaptability. Well done ⭐️!!
🔎 INSIGHTS
🌍 Greening the Built Environment Report and Market Map
The “Building a Sustainable Workforce: Greening the Built Environment” Report & Market Map was published at the end of May.
To green the built 🏡 environment, we need both tools and talent. The tools being the hardware and software, and the talent being the European workforce with the necessary skills. If the workforce can be trained and supported using technology, the opportunities to train at scale, retain, revise and upskill are all enhanced.
Brighteye and Ufi Ventures jointly produced this report to:
📍 Quantify the scale of the problem
📍Define the types of green skills needed in the built environment
📍Highlight specific opportunities for startups and sector players
📍Share examples of what is working
📍Map the landscape
To celebrate the launch of the report we hosted a digital event. 🍿 You can catch the full recording here:
🎪 EVENTS
🇬🇧 Join us at London Edtech Week!
Coming up next week, 17-21 June, we are happy to be partners of London Edtech Week 2024. Kicking off on Monday 17 June, we are co-hosting the Opening Reception alongside Oppenheimer. We’re at capacity, but should be able to accept a few more – register now, if you haven’t already.
We’re also partnering with Matt Walton on a Product Market Fit workshop on Wednesday 19 June. It is completely full, but we have a waitlist that you can sign up to, just in case any spaces 🪑 should open up.
For the rest of the week we’ll be running around meeting the Edtech community, speaking at and attending events and doing the networking. Please let us know if you’re in London and want to catch up!
The Brighteye Edtech Startup Festival 2024
Our annual Brighteye Edtech Startup Festival will be back this September! We are preparing the details for the online sessions, but please save the dates: Tuesday 3 - Thursday 5 September!!
📸 A recap from recent events
We have recently co-hosted, attended and enjoyed some fab events, here’s a little collection of shots: 🔸 from the 4th in the series of AI in L&D Meetups in London, co-hosted with team Mindstone and Orrick Tech, 🔸 the South Summit in Madrid 🇪🇸 last week, where we were proud to see our portfolio companies UpHill Health and Shakers on stage 🌟 several times and enjoyed the Transcend Edtech Meetup, and finally 🔸 a quick visit to the London & Partners’ International Welcome event at London Tech Week.
🏄🏽♀️ The Team Brighteye Swiss Surfing Experience
As promised, a little taste of how much fun we had!