🌱 Our March Update: New Colleague and New Investment
Dear all 🌷,
We hope you are doing well!
This month we are delighted to have welcomed Ghita Targhi as our new Associate on the Brighteye Team. Ghita is based in our Paris office 🇫🇷, already getting into sourcing deals and working with the European Edtech community.
Prior to Brighteye, Ghita devised and executed operational strategies at a fintech scale-up where her remit included data analytics and optimisation. She then made the leap to VC, identifying investment opportunities, conducting due diligence 🔍, and finalising investments for a fintech focused fund. Her multifaceted skill set is complemented by proficiency in numerous languages and a strong academic 🎓 background in Finance and Entrepreneurship 🛠️.
👋🏽 We hope you'll all join us in giving Ghita the warmest welcome!!
This update also includes:
Investment Update – UpHill Health secures €7M Series A
Selected News from the Portfolio – Deliveroo riders learn with Lynx and 40% Pleo productivity increase with Skiller Whale
Insights – Learning Design Deep Dive with Kirsten Campbell-Howes
Events – Gearing up for ASU+GSV
We hope you enjoy the read!
Best,
The Brighteye Team
💰 INVESTMENT UPDATE
🔂 Uphill Health - €7M Series A (Reinvestment)
We're delighted to continue accompanying Uphill Health, who this week announced their €7M Series A round led by Explorer Investments and Redstone, alongside maze impact and ourselves, and including CAIXA and Luz Saúde.
Lisbon-based 🇵🇹 Uphill orchestrates and automates care journeys for hospitals and patients. By marrying productivity with just-in-time learning for healthcare professionals and patients, the company lowers costs and improves outcomes, quickly becoming the standard for hospitals in Portugal and Spain. This round should help the company expand their 👣 footprint, bringing Uphill's benefits to users across Europe 🌍.
Our Founding Partner Benoit Wirz said: “When we started speaking with Uphill’s Founders Eduardo Freire Rodrigues and Duarte Sequeira in 2020, we were excited by their unique combination of skills as both developers and physicians and their vision for marrying learning and productivity in healthcare. UpHill delivers tremendous ROI for patients, professionals and healthcare institutions alike by automating guidance and follow-up at key moments in patients’ care journeys. We expect these benefits to only increase as the product evolves in the coming months and years, and we’re excited to continue accompanying UpHill"
🗞️ Media coverage from Sifted, EU-Startups, Tech Funding News, Silicon Canals!
📣 SELECTED NEWS FROM THE PORTFOLIO
🧰 Animoca/Open Campus partners with RiseIn
Rise in, the Web3 education platform from our portfolio company Patika announced a partnership with Web3 platform Animoca and Open Campus! In a 10-day free, online bootcamp, Rise in aims to educate the next generation of content creators, educators and developers to start creating and publishing technical tutorials through practical experience in instructional design, tutorial creation, publishing and distributing technical content. Join to experience creating educational content in web3 and gain valuable skills, starting on 28 March!
🔥 Pleo gets 40% productivity boost from Skiller Whale
Great news from Skiller Whale, who have been working with global fintech Pleo, the cloud-based spend management platform, for live team coaching - resulting in a 40%t boost to productivity from their engineering teams. Skiller Whale has been working with Pleo’s 200-strong engineering team for more than a year, with sessions focused on upskilling the team’s REST API capabilities. Live team coaching provides fast, flexible learning for engineering teams, targeted to individual skill gaps to provide a strategic team-level outcome. After 12x 60-90 minute sessions delivered every 2 weeks, Pleo’s CTO found that throughput improved by 40%, cycle time improved by 15%, and time to first review improved by 30%. Impressive and well done, team Skiller Whale.
🚴🏻♀️ Deliveroo riders to learn with Lynx Educate
We’re thrilled to hear that Paris-based Lynx Educate just launched an exciting partnership with Deliveroo, to provide a new learning and skills programme for all Deliveroo riders and their families, globally. An extensive range of educational courses provides unique opportunities to broaden their learning and upskill for future careers whilst working flexibly with Deliveroo. Riders can choose from over 1,000 online courses, including business management, coding, project management, and photography amongst others. 🔗 Read the full story here!
🔎 INSIGHTS
📝 Learning Design 101
We sat down with Kirsten Campbell-Howes, our learning design mentor 📖, for the first deep dive in a series designed to help founders and their teams approach learning design projects in the most effective ways.
We covered ✅:
1. How to define learning outcomes
2. How to understand your target audience of learners
3. How to avoid common pitfalls when designing a curriculum
& lots more...
You can watch a taster below and access the full edition on our website here.
🎪 EVENTS
🇺🇸 See you at ASU+GSV?
ASU+GSV is coming up in San Diego shortly, and we are excited to be there on 14-17 April. We are very excited to co-host a Transatlantic Founder/Investor Mixer together with our friends at Educapital, Emerge Education, MediaHuis and Sparkmind on the Monday evening. Please let Hege, our Head of Community, know if you’d like to register!
📸 A few March Memories
Event season is most definitely in full swing! Since our last update, we have been to SXSW EDU in Austin, Texas, co-hosted an AI in L&D Meetup in London, shared a lovely lunch with our portfolio companies in Paris, and hosted a visit for students and staff from Minerva University in Notting Hill.
There are a lot more activities coming up this spring and early summer, more on that soon!