ETCH Weekend Reading 3/18/24
The digital SAT, New Mexico's $1B free college fund, LinkedIn gets into gaming, and a new GenAI for Education market map
Hello!
No announcements this week, straight to the news!
Funding / M&A
PlanetSpark raises $11M / India, Content Provider / Prime Venture Partners, Innoven Capital, Alteria Capital, myPat, GGT3 Ventures, IAN Investors
Legends raises $6M / US, Mental Health / Floodgate Capital, Reach Capital
Ask for the Moon raises €2.5M / France, Corporate Infrastructure / Matterwave Ventures, UI Investissement
Niyyah raises $2M / UK, Content Provider / Venrex, Cur8 Capital, Active Partners, Emerge, Collective Continuum
Smartschool raises $1.5M / US, Test Prep / Inovo VC, The Explorer Fund
Skillshare acquires Superpeer / US, Content Platform
Classera acquires Expert Solutions / US (Saudi Arabia), School Software Infrastructure
Avallain acquires Teachermatic / UK, Content Provider
HCL Group invests $20M in Education Initiatives / India, Content Provider
Note: this was a secondary sale, not an equity round
To be a verified funding in this newsletter, a company must raise $1M+ from named institutional investors, be part of an acquisition where the combined entity has > 50 employees, or raise a VC/PE fund of $10M+
Other Transactions
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People Moves
Celeste Grupman promoted to CEO of Dataquest / via Hypepotamus
Vishaal Gupta joins Pearson as President of Workforce Skills / via PR Newswire
Darren Person joins Cengage as Chief Digital Officer / via Cengage
Yukun Harsono joins Lexia as SVP of Strategy and Operations / via K12 Dive
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Links
Early Childhood
A new collaboration between Head Start and the Association of Community College Trustees to support the 4M college students(!) raising children while enrolled. / via NPR
K12
Everything you need to know about Biden’s FY2025 budget proposal | for the Education Department. / via K12 Dive and 74Million
Related, learning shouldn’t take a summer break, White House and Ed Department say. I’m still not sure when this will happen, but I am increasingly convinced that there will be substantial changes to the traditional school calendar in the not too distant future. / via K12 Dive
College Board declares launch of the digital SAT a success. / via K12 Dive
Related to updates to the technology side of the college application system, the Common App helps colleges experiment with asking applicants how home life affects them. This seems like positive, holistic counterweight to the trend back towards using standardized testing in admissions decisions. / via Hechinger Report
Stride Inc and American Public University partner to provide pathway to more affordable college degrees. After 2+ decades on online education we still haven’t really seen a scaled, vertically-integrated provider of both high school and college degrees. This partnership is not that, but is an interesting experiment in that direction. / via Yahoo! Finance
Higher Ed
US research funding increasingly reliant on corporate agendas. Most of today’s discourse on US universities, especially on business side of the industry, revolves around student job outcomes. That is not an inherently bad thing; many US universities have a long history of graduating students into low-earning roles. But it ignores the two other core functions pillars that, for better or for worse, we’ve built universities to serve - local/regional employment and research. / via Times Higher Education
Related, should sports be included as one of those pillars? Revenues from college sports is, probably, the most anamolous part of US universities compared to the rest of the world. Which makes me think they will detach faster than anyone expects. Don’t be surprised if a name-brand, former-glory school - maybe in Florida? - turns over management of its sports teams to a private equity firm in exchange for a (lucrative and negligible-overhead) brand license. / via Institutional Investor
How universities can prepare graduates for an AI-driven world. I’m starting a tally of university presidents who strongly endorse or disparage the use of AI in education. Please feel free to send examples my way, I suspect the results will be enlightening. / via Higher Ed Dive
New Mexico commits $1B to “free college” fund. There was a trend of state disinvestment in public universities from 2008 to 2020. One strategy many public universities took to shore up their finances during this period was to recruit out-of-state students who paid higher tuition prices. This initiative in New Mexico has already boosted enrollments by 10%; I’d love to know whether it is also an effective strategy for keeping students from going out-of-state for college. / via Chronicle of Higher Education
Related to state level post-secondary funding strategies, an overview of Hire UP, a program in California that *pays* formerly incarcerated, current/former foster youth, and low-income parents with children for the hours they attend community college. / via Press Democrat
ASU (via Cintana) signs MOU with Saudi Ministry of Education to establish affiliated school in Riyadh. / via Saudi Press Agency
Workforce
LinkedIn plans to add gaming to its platform. LinkedIn says these games will “unlock a bit of fun, deepen relationships, and hopefully spark the opportunity for conversations.” To speculate, hosting games on-platform also seems like a great potential Trojan Horse for large-scale skills assessment and skills-based hiring. / via Techcrunch
EdTech
A map of Generative AI for education. The second annual update to what should be the starting point for anyone interested in researching / investing / operating in this part of the EdTech space. / via Laurence Holt on Medium
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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