🔵 Our March Update: Join our Founder Studio in London!
Hello 🔆,
We hope you are doing well!
Who wants to “move in” with us at the Brighteye London office this spring? If you, or someone you know, are a hungry, ambitious early-stage founder ready to build or already building something category-defining in learning and work, we’d like to hear from you!
Why? We are introducing the Brighteye Founder Studio. Starting in late April, we are inviting a small, carefully selected cohort of very early-stage tech founders to join us for a curated, intensive 12-week programme. More details and link to apply below!
In addition, this month’s update includes:
Selected News from the Portfolio – Sdui Group becomes Seven Education
Insights – How to Sell your Company, an Exit playbook for Founders
Events – Product For Learning Meetup with Laura Kirsop at Raspberry Pi Foundation
Please enjoy, and have a great Thursday!
Best,
The Brighteye Team
🔵 FOUNDER STUDIO
Calling all early-stage Learning & Work Founders!!
Starting in April 2026, team Brighteye are inviting a small, carefully selected cohort of very early-stage tech founders to join us at our Founders Studio in Notting Hill for a 12-week programme focused on securing design partners and pilots.
You’ll:
🔸 Connect with other ambitious founders addressing some of the most interesting challenges and opportunities in learning and work
🔸 Tap into hands-on startup support from the Brighteye team, mentors and other experts as you’re building
🔸 Get support on reaching potential clients and enterprise pilots, through direct connections and demo days with corporate partners
🔸 Work from our ground-floor office space
The goal is for you to leave the residency with these partners and pilots sorted, equipped with fundraising guidance to help you take your company to the next level when the time is right.
Who should apply?
🔹Very early stage founders - MVP built and tested
🔹 Building in the future of learning and work
🔹 Small team - 1-3 people
🔹 Based in or able to be in London 2+ days per week
All the details and the form to register interest is right here:
🔵 SELECTED NEWS FROM THE PORTFOLIO
Sdui Group becomes Seven Education
Big news from The Sdui Group, the market leader among European education technology platforms, which is now operating under the name Seven Education. With this rebranding, our portfolio company brings together its group of education brands under a shared identity and creating a clear framework for an integrated, constantly expanding portfolio of digital solutions for everyday education.
Over the past few years, the solutions Sdui, Additio App, PUPIL, FoxEducation and Educamos have grown into an international group of companies. Most recently, Digital Learning GmbH, a leading provider of education and administration solutions in Germany, and its affiliated company Digital Services 42 GmbH, an expert in hosting infrastructure and managed services, has been welcomed to the group.
With Seven Education, the vision, values and strengths are merged into an integrated platform, covering all key areas: School communication, class management, digital lesson planning, school administration and AI features. The solutions make processes more effective, collaboration easier, and foster individual growth – with one clear goal: To give teachers time and space for what really matters!
Podcast alert!
To learn more, tune in to hear CEO and Founder Daniel Zacharias on the latest episode of the Startup Spotlight Podcast (in German), covering:
🔹 the reasons behind the rebranding
🔹 the investment round with Bain Capital
🔹 the vision of an Education OS for all of Europe
Zen Educate on FT1000: Europe’s Fastest-Growing Companies 2026
Congrats to team Zen Educate, who with an absolute growth rate of 752.1, grabs the #126 spot on The FT1000 Europe’s Fastest-Growing Companies 2026. Compiled with research company Statista, the FT lists the European companies that achieved the highest compound annual growth rate in revenue between 2021 and 2024. The 2026 edition is the tenth annual list showcases 1,000 examples of outstanding business performance. Well done, Zen!
🔵 INSIGHTS
How to Sell Your Company - our recent paper on Exits
Most founders don’t start a company planning to sell it. They start to build something valuable, fix a problem, or prove a point. But exits don’t simply happen; they are built.
Exploring the Exit landscape, we published the “How To Sell Your Company” report, a detailed paper bringing together insights covering everything from preparation to paperwork, from choosing advisors to managing your team post-exit, from your shared visions to your valuations.
The best outcomes - financially, strategically, and emotionally - tend to belong to founders who were exit-ready long before a formal process began.
🔗 Head to Sidekick for a two-page summary and link to the full paper here!
It covers:
A look at the headline data
The playbook that all founders can use in their exits process
A selection of case studies
Thanks to all the bankers, lawyers, founders and acquirers for your great contributions to helping us address the opaque and under-covered subject of Exits!
Europe’s skills gap – the missing layer
Europe has world-class universities, a large diaspora of internationally mobile workers, and structural demand across every major sector. What it lacks is the infrastructure to convert that potential into organised talent flows.
In our new report “The missing layer in Europe’s workforce infrastructure” published today, Brighteye Partner David Guérin is exploring how companies rethink how talent moves across borders and leveraging the strategic “talent importation” lever.
We share our thinking on:
🔸 Why we believe this space matters now
🔸 Our understanding of four broad categories we see shaping the early landscape – a market map with observations
🔸 Where we believe the largest opportunities may lie
We believe that whoever connects skills creation to mobility infrastructure in a structured way will own a significant share of the labour supply chain for Europe’s most acute shortages. Founders building in immigration infrastructure, full-stack mobility or sector-specific migration rails - not just workflow tools - let’s talk (dg@brighteyevc.com)!
We’re on the Pathfounders Podcast
After the publication of our European Learning & Work Funding Report 2026 in January, we were thrilled when Mike Butcher ✍️, Founder and Editor at Pathfounders, invited Rhys Spence, our Head of Platform & Research, to join him to talk about it on the podcast. We really enjoyed the conversation, unpacking some of the results, trends and changes we cover in the report.
Still not explored the full report?
It’s live on our Brighteye Sidekick Resource hub here!
🔵 EVENTS
Coming up…
South Summit Scaleup Series Paris – we’re on stage tonight
The Brighteye family will be represented on two panels this evening, as team South Summit arrives in Paris 🇫🇷 with their Scaleup Series, connecting European leaders in the scaleup ecosystem.
Samir Tahraoui, CEO & Co-Founder at our portfolio company LabLabee, will be on the “From Paris to the World, and back again” founder panel, alongside Juan José Güemes of IE University and Amine Raji at Spore.Bio.
On the “Investing in growth: Unlocking opportunities” investor panel, our Partner David Guérin will be speaking alongside Cédric Voigt of Ballou, Bruno Delahaye at Cathay Innovation and Samantha J. at Elaia.
All set for an excellent evening of great conversations!
Product for Learning with the Raspberry Pi Foundation
In the next Product For Learning Meetup in London, on Tuesday 21 April, we will focus on the timely topic of building responsible products for children, with Laura Kirsop, the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s Chief Product and Technology Officer, joining for a fireside chat and spark conversation.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a global charity democratising access to Computer Science education. Laura’s team builds the platforms and tools used by millions of children and educators globally. She’ll be sharing insights from the coalface of designing safe, responsible products for young people, and why RPF’s mission-driven model creates both a responsibility and a genuine opportunity to do things differently.
Laura will give her take on questions including:
What does it actually mean to design with learning and wellbeing, not just engagement, in mind?
How do you build principled frameworks for safety, data, and responsible design without reinventing the wheel?
What happens when you co-design with children? (Spoiler: they’ll surprise you every time.)
How to navigate the heavy lift of regulation, particularly when expanding into the US.
Why is so much technology still not designed with young people’s interests at heart, and what can we do about it?
There will be the usual opportunity to get to know others building new learning products in breakout discussions. The evening will be compared by Matt Walton, coach and fractional Edtech product leader.
Matt has also recently penned two Guest Blogs on Product Market Fit for our Brighteye Sidekick resource hub.
The first looks at the 4 Dimensions that you need to consider to be able to create a successful learning product:
🧩 Read the full Dimensions blog here
The second looks at the Stages you need to work through to successfully find true PMF, from pre to mature:
🧩 Read the full Stages blog here
Already happened…
Exits Evening Recap
We got a lovely crowd of founders, investors and operators together in London a few weeks back, to talk about the opaque and under-covered subject of exits.
Teaming up with leading global investment bank Houlihan Lokey and top global executive search firm Erevena, we hosted an evening full of insights, conversations and networking.
Our Head of Platform & Research, Rhys Spence, kicked off with sharing key findings from our big paper “How to sell your company” – an exit playbook for founders, which was published last week (details above).
To dig into the details and real life experience, we were happy to be joined by:
🎤 Sophie Glanfield- Investment team atTenzing
🎤 James Weatherill- CEO atArbor Education(acquired byPermira
🎤 James Local- Managing Director atHoulihan Lokey
🎤 Benoit Wirz- Founding Partner at Brighteye (moderator)
