💎 Our September Update: Re-investments in LabLabee and La Solive
Happy September, all,
It’s back to school 🚌 all around and we are already enjoying busy days.
Brighteye launched our AI Campaign this month, a series of deeper dives into AI in Edtech, covering opportunities and status in K12, Higher Ed, Vocational Education and Corporate learning. An Intro to what to expect is live, and the very first post, AI’s Role in Shaping the Future of K12, was published earlier today – read more below, to find out more.
We are also happy to share our wider September updates, including:
Investment Updates – 2 French re-investments announced: LabLabee & La Solive
Selected News from the Portfolio – Shakers selected for Google AI Programme
Insights – New AI Campaign and all the Startup Festival recordings
Events – We’ll be at Bits & Pretzels
Grab a coffee and please enjoy!
Best,
The Brighteye Team ☀️
💰 INVESTMENT UPDATES
🔁 LabLabee - $3.4M Seed
It’s been amazing to see our portco LabLabee announce its successful seed funding round at €3.4M, marking a significant step in democratising future network and cloud technologies. Their mission is to provide immersive, accessible, and affordable hands-on training that empowers professionals worldwide to master cutting-edge technologies like never before, and we are thrilled to keep supporting them on this – go Samir, Mahfoud and team!!
The round was led by Reach Capital and supported by Classera, along with us and other existing investors e& capital. Notable business angels such as Cedric Sellin (Investor & Advisor in Tech) and Mohammed Husamaddin (VP of Business Development at Naseej) also joined the funding round.
💡 Read the Why We Invested here, and check out the media coverage by CRN.com, Light Reading and Tech Funding News!
🔁 La Solive - €4M Series A
We’re happy to share that our portco La Solive 🇫🇷, the energy renovation school, recently closed their Series A round at €4M, led by Partech. At Brighteye we are proud to have already participated in the earlier Seed round and to now keep working with Ariane Komorn, Côme de Cossé Brissac and the team moving forward and upward!
La Solive offers short, intensive training courses to enable adults undergoing retraining to become energy renovation project managers or qualified craftspeople.
Business angels, including Thibaud Hug de Larauze (CEO of Back Market), Vincent BRYANT (CEO of Deepki), and Clément Delpirou (President of the IAD Group) also took part in the funding round.
🗞️ There was some good media coverage of the news, including by Tech Funding News, EU-Startups, Les Echos (🇫🇷)
📣 SELECTED NEWS FROM THE PORTFOLIO
⭐️ Kickstarter success for Unistellar
Big congrats to Unistellar, the supplier of digital telescopes made for passionate stargazers, on the successful raise of €2.6M in the Kickstarter campaign they ran for the smart binoculars this spring, exceeding the target. Well done, team!
🍀 Shakers join Google AI programme
We’re proud of Shakers, the platform for building a workforce from freelance talent, for being selected as one of the 13 companies joining the latest Google AI Programme – picked among 500 applications. Well done team, make the most of all the learning and connections to the best of Google's products and people to scale towards success in the rapidly evolving landscape of AI and technology!!
🏅 Two Portcos on regional LinkedIn Top Startups of 2024
LinkedIn recently named their top startups of the year in different regions, and we were happy to discover at least two of our portfolio companies among the listed 🙌🏼 – go get them, teams Patika (in Turkish) and Shakers (in Spanish).
🔎 INSIGHTS
👀 Our new AI Campaign is live
We recently launched a new campaign diving into the use and opportunities of AI in learning, with sub-focuses on:
🎒 K12 (live now)
🎓 Higher Ed
🧑🔧 Vocational education
👩💼 Corporate learning
We address questions like:
🤖 What’s happening at the leading edge of AI in education?
🔮 What’s next and where are the opportunities?
🔍 What does AI adoption look like now?
💭 What will it take to achieve widespread adoption?
🗺️ And it wouldn’t be a Brighteye report without a market map…
So far the primer and the AI’s Role in Shaping the future of K12 are live:
📣 And for the rest, watch this space…!
📹 The Edtech Startup Festival Recordings
We had a ball hosting the Brighteye Edtech Startup Festival earlier this month. 6 Sessions across 3 Days secured a lot of great content and learning. All the recordings are now available!
🎪 EVENTS
🗓️ Coming up…..
Staying in Germany, please reach out if you’d like to catch up ⏱️ with our Associates Izzy and Ghita at Bits & Pretzels in Munich 🇩🇪 next week!
We are again proud to co-host the AI in L&D Meetups in London 🇬🇧 with Mindstone and Orrick tech. The next one is coming up on Tuesday 1 October. There are still spaces and you can secure yours here!
☕️ It was good to see you!
So, the events season is totally on! In the past few weeks we have enjoyed being involved in TechBBQ in Copenhagen, where we joined forces with Redstone Ventures to host a Garden Session (pictured below) featuring conversations with Founders Magnus Liungmann of PeakPath and Christian Rebernik of Tomorrow University. This week the team have been attending Oslo Innovation Week and the Marketplace conference by Speedinvest in Berlin.
