ETCH Weekend Reading 4/22/24

Childcare expansion for military families, chaos in the school drop-off line, don't be an education Eeyore

Hello!

Programming note: it is Wednesday (and most of you will read this on Thursday), which is a funny day to send a “Weekend Reading” post. But, last week was a busy week with GSV announcements and this week looks to be pretty full as well (see Anthology’s $250M fundraise). So I wanted to give them two separate newsletters (this one, and another on Sunday), even if the timing is off - thank you for bearing with me!

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Funding / M&A

• Beyond Odds Technologies raises $11M / India, Staffing Platform / Matrix Partners India, Lightspeed, Alteria Capital, Innoven Capital

• Draftboard raises $4.1M / US, Recruitment Platform / Founder Collective, Twelve Below

• Paraform raises $3.6M / US, Recruitment Platform / A*

• NextWork raises $2.3M / New Zealand, Upskilling / GD1, Blackbird, Icehouse, PhaseOne

• Superintelligent raises $2M / US, Content Provider / Learn Capital

• Adro raises $1.5M / US, Student Financing / Ex Nihilo Ventures, Cornell Tech Syndicate

• Follett acquires MasterLibrary / US, School Software Infrastructure

To be a verified funding in this newsletter, a company must raise $1M+ from named, searchable institutional investors and disclose the amount raised, be part of an acquisition where the combined entity has > 50 employees, or raise a VC/PE fund of $10M+

Other Transactions

• All Seas Capital invests in Reducate

• Kangarootime acquires Clay

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ETCH Funding Database

All of the above deals, and 1,000+ more can be found in the ETCH Funding Database, available in Beta to annual subscribers. Upgrade your subscription to learn more.

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People Moves

• Andy Myers joins eLuma as CEO / via PRNewswire

• Elias Tavarez joins Interplay Learning as Chief Revenue Officer / via PRNewswire

• Byju’s India CEO Arjun Mohan steps down / via Reuters

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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Product Demo(s)

• Are you an administrator of a non-profit, school or college advising, counseling, mentoring or coaching program and sick and tired of nobody reading your emails? Or, are you a parent of teens and tired of juggling emails, texts and four apps across three kids? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions and would like to participate in free pilot program to test an app to coordinate messaging across all of a student’s stakeholders, fill out this form

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Links

Early Childhood

• Bipartisan bill to expand childcare access for military families. “As a mom and a new grandma, I know it takes a village to raise a child and that our military members need high-quality, affordable child care for their young ones,” she said. “By boosting training and recruitment efforts, this bipartisan bill will ensure military kids are safe and loved while their parents diligently train and prepare to protect our nation.” / via CNBC

K12

• LAUSD’s far-reaching AI experiment. There is a lot riding on LAUSD’s chatbot, Ed. The project sits at the intersection of a high-profile stakeholder (Alberto Carvalho), a high-profile district (LAUSD, the second-biggest school district in the country), and a high-profile category (AI). If the project succeeds, it would be a meaningful win for EdTech. I will be following the results closely, though will be careful not to rush to judgement in what should be a multiyear project. / via Education Week

• Tantrums and turf wars: the school car line is chaos. What I love about school principals in general, and elementary school principals in particular, is their ability to distill complex social problems into words a first grader can understand and embody - “If you find yourself running late, get up earlier.” / via Wall Street Journal

  • Also, to be crass about it, what a great year to have raised $140M for your busing startup. / via PRNewswire (from January)

• Hot market for pencils helps kids turn lead into gold. My only problem with this article is the lack of data. How big is the K12 pencil marketplace economy? How much does a 9 year-old pencil entrepreneur make per school year? What are the average startup costs for pencil brokers? / via Wall Street Journal

• 32 year-old takes ACT as fantasy football punishment. 4 days under private equity ownership and the ACT team is already entering new markets! Can’t wait to see what they cook up next. / via BroBible

Higher Ed

• How the Biden administration messed up FAFSA. I am wary of saying “the sky is falling” but I think we might start hearing about some ugly college enrollment numbers for Summer and Fall in the next couple of weeks. / via The Atlantic

• A betting scandal rocked Iowa sports. Then the case went sideways. One way schools might fill the gap in their budgets? Even more partnerships with gambling companies. Seeing these companies’ ads plastered all over campus and on every sports app, podcast, and website they consume, it is, sadly, no wonder that (still largely unpaid) college athletes are getting caught up in places they shouldn’t be. / via Washington Post

• VA Congressman Don Beyer enrolls in George Mason’s Master’s degree in AI. This is great, more members of congress should do this! / via Associated Press

Workforce

• Crotonville and the death of fun at work. The core premise is interesting - that today’s workers are more disassociated from their employers than anytime in recent memory. However, I reject the author’s notion that this is a “Gen Z” problem. The author’s late husband, Jack Welch, literally had a book written about how he “crushed the soul of corporate America” in the way he financialized General Electric. (He also had nothing to do with Crotonville, which was established two decades before he became CEO.) Companies’ focus on shareholder value ahead of employees provides the grounding for my own thoughts on the prospective emergence of a more modern form of labor union. / via Wall Street Journal

  • Speaking of fun at work, Samsung shifts executives to six-day workweeks to “inject a sense of crisis.” / via the Verge

  • While Singapore leans into the 4-day workweek. / via South China Morning Post

EdTech

• CFPB fines Bloomtech (fka Lambda School) for deceptive marketing practices. It is *really* hard to build a breakout EdTech company without previous Education/EdTech experience and Bloomtech loudly pushed the boundaries of established regulations for a number of years (though seem to have gotten better since rebranding). / via Techcrunch

  • Bloomtech’s individual actions were not great. Even worse, they add to the growing pile of high-profile companies with debatable and/or actively fraudulent practices in the vicinity of student financing. As a result, you will see fewer and fewer investors and entrepreneurs willing to wade in to this part of the EdTech market.

  • That is not a good thing! Student debt remains at all time highs and there is no vision from the public sector for how to remediate this either. (Student loan relief is not a vision for a better system, it is what you do once you have a better system in place.)

• Don’t be an education Eeyore. I think about this with every edition of this newsletter. Eeyores get clicks. But it isn’t that fun being an Eeyore, so I try to find a balance. Sometime more successfully than others. This essay provides a warm reminder that we all should keep a running list of things they are excited about in education. / via Aldeman on Education

  • That said, sometimes the headlines just write themselves…Meta announces future intent to probably launch something in education. As much as I am excited about VR-in-education, I feel obligated to point out that this “announcement” does not actually include details on what the company plans to offer. If anything, the release is notable for its omission of the company’s previous forays into the education world, including the $150M Immersive Learning Fund and “metaversity” project.¹ / via Meta

  • To balance out my Meta snark, Are video games coming for the novel? It is amazing how many different tools today’s creatives have at their disposal to build new universes, whether that is through the written word or an immersive video game universe (or both at once). / via Financial Times

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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 (Twitter links still do not embed well in Substack)

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1. New Mexico State University’s crimonology VR course content is mentioned in the release and was part of the “metaversity” project, but these appear to be unrelated efforts at the same university. Caveat emptor.