ETCH Weekend Reading 12/3/23

EdTech funding did not break for Thanksgiving

Hello!

For those in the US, hope you had a restful Thanksgiving! For those abroad, hope you enjoyed some peace and quiet as well. Two announcements before we get to the links:

1. End-of-Year Survey: Last chance to get your thoughts in, survey closes Wednesday! Survey here.

2. End of Year Posting Schedule: Next Sunday (12/10) will be the last Weekend Reading post of 2023. There will also be Funding + M&A Updates this week and next before I pivot to end-of-year posts and a holiday break in the second half of December.

With that, on to the update!

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Funding / M&A

• Kahuna raises $21M / US, Talent Management & Skills Assessment / Resolve Growth Partners

• Inclusively raises $13M / US, Talent Management / Firework Ventures, Benson Capital

• Retorio raises €9M / Germany, Coaching / Square One, Porsche Ventures, Storm Ventures, Basinghall Ventures, Passion Capital, Sofia Ventures

• HappyPal raises €7M / France, HR Platform / Educapital, Anthemis

• Clayful raises $7M / US, Mental Health / Reach Capital, Ovo Fund, Common Sense Ventures, Charter School Growth Fund, Wisdom Ventures, Google Latino Founders Fund

• Augment raises $6M / France, Degree Alternatives / RTP Global, Motier Ventures, Origins Fund, Kima Ventures, BPI France, Financière Saint James

• Nolej raises €3M / France, AI Tutoring / Educapital, Square Knowledge Ventures

• Nucleos raises $3M / US, Procurement Platform / iT1, WGU Labs, ScaleGood Fund

• Earlywork raises $1.5M / Australia, Bootcamps / No Brand, Jelix Ventures, Archangel Ventures, Ultraviolet Ventures

• Tech Spark AI raises $1.4M / Canada, Content Provider / TD Bank, Salesforce, NBA Canada

• Mysalescoach raises £700K / UK, Bootcamps / North /East Innovation Fund

• Toddl.co raises €500K / Spain, Extracurriculars / Fondo Bolsa Social, BStartup

• Liledu raises €125K / Lithuania, Early Childhood Development / Firstpick VC

• ParentSquared acquires Remind / US, School Software Infrastructure

• Curriculum Associates acquires Soapbox Labs / US (Ireland), Publishers

• Allen Career Institute acquires Doubtnut / India, Test Prep

• Neuberger Berman Capital acquires minority stake in Colibri Group / US, Continuing Education

  • Colibri Group acquires TRC Healthcare¹ / US, Continuing Education

• Validated Insights acquires 32EDU / US, Student Recruiting

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People Moves

• Kevin Wiggen joins Atypical AI as CTO / via ETCH and on LinkedIn (where you are encouraged to engage!)

• Kelli Campbell promoted to CEO of Acceleration Academies / via PR Newswire

• Jennifer Sheffield promoted to CEO of HeyTutor / via Yahoo! Finance

• Andrew Sweeney joins ETU as COO / via ETU

• Jiny Thattil promoted to CTO of Byju’s / via Techcrunch

• John Orsanic joins Imagine Learning as CFO / via Yahoo! Finance

• Stewart Monk joins PowerSchool as SVP, GM of International / via businesswire

• Multiverse lays off 44 US Employees / via Sifted and The Guardian²

Looking for a job or hiring in EdTech? Join the ETCH Jobs Community and/or subscribe to our Jobs of the Week (JOTW) newsletter!

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Links

K12

• This tutoring moment could fail if we don’t tighten up our models. “I worry that policymakers will pretend high-dosage tutoring is happening at scale and then, when student outcomes do not measurably improve, declare that it hasn’t worked.” This scenario feels likely. / via the 74Million

• Why is the College Board pushing to expand Advanced Placement? In short, they now make more money ($500M last year) from AP Tests than they do from the SAT (~$300M). I don’t find the College Board’s expansion tactics particularly sinister - as a school, would you rather get a high-quality curriculum for free and be charged for the textbook or pay for the textbook and, additionally, design the final exam yourself? But, given the size and national importance of the organization, I don’t mind it receiving more scrutiny than it has gotten historically. / via New York Times

• Biden administration announces $74M in grant funding to support community schools in 20 states around the US. / via US Department of Education

• Kids who start reading younger and maintain the habit have better mental health. / via Washington Post

Higher Ed

• 2U faces upcoming existential changes. Helpful analysis from Phil Hill on the financial challenges 2U is up against as their stock continues to get hammered in the public markets. In short, the company has a lot of debt and has neither the cashflow nor the friendly interest-rate environment of the 2010s to dig itself out on its own. / via OnEdTech

  • For what it’s worth, we are just ~10 years removed from the retrenchment of the textbook publishing industry, which included the bankruptcies of Cengage and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Pearson’s selling spree, and McGraw Hill’s sale to Apollo Global. Most schools who try to do online by themselves will fail. Like the publishers, the OPMs will survive (probably with the help of PE funds).

• College courses that teach students how to make small talk. It is unclear to me whether this article realizes how entertaining it is. Helping students transition to the workforce is an important issue, but it is impossible not to smile at the thought of a medieval literature professor “recommend[ing] students try swiping deodorant on palms to avoid clammy handshakes.” / via Wall Street Journal

  • Related, while some schools are deploying medieval professors to teach about modern jobs (and keeping their modern professors focused on training students for medieval jobs), others are investing in revamped career centers. / via Hechinger Report

  • Also related,

    Dr. Michelle R. Weise
    wrote a thoughtful essay on how we deploy social capital in the hiring process. No deodorant recommendations, but plenty of evergreen concepts for both employers and folks trying to get hired. / via
    Skilling Me Softly

• Education Department plans for negotiated rulemaking next year. This is important, as negotiated rulemaking is about as close as we can get to debating and setting government standards for higher education institutions while elected officials continue to avoid updating the Higher Education Act. / via Higher Ed Dive

• The University of California drops carbon offsets. Lots of discussion to be had around this, but the core principle resonates, “Ultimately, it’s just better if you invest in yourself, invest in your infrastructure, and do the direct work on decarbonization.” / via MIT Technology Review

• StraighterLine courses now available on Acadeum course-sharing platform. Just a couple of weeks ago we learned that the Education Department wanted to make college courses much more transferable between institutions. This should put wind in the sails of course providers like StraighterLine and course marketplaces like Acadeum. / via Campus Technology

Workforce

• The artist formerly known as Twitter reveals hiring platform, X Hiring. Say what you will about Elon Musk, the man is willing to iterate in public. The X Hiring product is so spartan it would make Marie Kondo proud, even re-using an old Twitter URL instead of making a new X one. And yet, Twitter/X/Whatever remains the best place for me to find, connect, and converse with smart people outside my network. I am not counting out this product. / via HR Dive

• CFPB orders sales bootcamp Prehired to pay $30M to students for illegal lending practices. / via CFPB

  • To wash the distaste of the Prehired story out of your mouth, consider reading about Social Finance’s Pay It Forward Fund. / via Work Shift

• Pearson partners with Forage to provide virtual job simulations. It’s been a quiet Fall for Pearson since naming their new CEO in September, I was surprised to see this announcement come out during the transition period.³ / via PR Newswire

Worthwhile Content

• My $500M Mars Rover Mistake: A Failure Story. An old soccer coach of mine used to say, “Use ‘I’ to take individual responsibility for your mistakes. Use ‘we’ to celebrate your wins with your team.” The author of this article survived a huge mistake because he owned it to the point where this potential horror story ends positively.

• Unbundling AI. As we’ve established, AI is neat. AGI may be as little as 3 to 5 years away. In the interim, and perhaps afterward (who knows?), you will hear a lot of debate about vertical (specific use-cases) and horizontal (general-purpose tools). Technology Analyst Benedict Evans provides a helpful framework for thinking about what this looks like from a technology user’s perspective. / via Ben Evans

  • Related, Michael Feldstein gives some examples of a similar framework at play in EdTech. / via e-literate

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This email, ETCH Weekend Reading, is ETCH’s free newsletter providing links to the week’s EdTech Funding, M&A, People moves, and a curated list of Links to relevant industry news. If you enjoyed this edition, I hope you will subscribe and/or forward to your friends!

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Xeet of the Week

Source (X still does not embed well within Substack)

I, also, am obsessed. We may still be figuring out AI-for-work, but AI art is on fire right now. Some other favorites - making a bowl of ramen more profitable, making a neighborhood more transit-oriented, making a barista more hipster, and making a pizza more delicious.

What makes these pictures so interesting is that, like any human artist, ChatGPT is making them based on its conception - fine, “conception” - of the human world around it. We gave the tool both the prompts and the training data to make the pictures, it just acted on what it knew.

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1. Colibri’s acquisition of TRC Healthcare was actually announced before Neuberger Berman Capital’s investment in Colibri, but it seems safe to assume the capital injection precipitated the acquisition.

2. I believe this story was broken by The Guardian, which also pulled more helpful financial information about Multiverse. However, I made the headline link from Sifted because The Guardian’s article felt inappropriately slanted against the company instead of trying to report the facts.

3. Yes, I’m sure this announcement was in the works prior to the new CEO announcement. It still means something that this release went out before the new CEO publicly articulates his strategy for the company.