ETCH Weekend Reading 5/27/24

School choice in Florida, NCAA to pay $2.8B in damages to former athletes, making up the AI rules as we go

Hello!

This newsletter comes to you a day later than normal because it is Memorial Day Weekend here in the US. I hope that many of you were able to take some extra time to rest as we head into the summer months!

Speaking of extra rest, there will be no Weekend Reading newsletter next week; I’ll be back in your inbox June 9th.

On to the news!

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Funding / M&A

• Zen Educate raises $37M / UK, Recruitment Platform / Round2 Capital, Adjuvo, Brighteye Ventures, FJ Labs, Ascension Ventures

  • Acquires Aquinas Education / UK, Recruitment Platform

• Praktika raises $35.5M / US, Language Learning / Blossom Capital

• Tiney raises £7.2M / UK, Early Childhood Education Software / Mustard Seed Partners, PortfolioLion, Sparkmind, Rubio

• SuperKalam raises $2M / India, Test Prep / Y Combinator, Fundersclub, Goodwater Capital, Nurture Ventures, SuperCapital, Pareto Ventures

• Coda acquires Plato / US (UK) / Mentorship

• Cornerstone acquires SkyHive / US (Canada) / Talent Management

• Times Higher Education acquires Education World Forum / UK, Media

• PowerToFly acquires Skillcrush / US, Talent Management (Upskilling)

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

• Gorilla Capital invests in game studio behind Lola Panda

• Edgro raises $25M in debt funding

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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

• Will Zemp steps down as CEO of Project Kitty Hawk / via Business North Carolina

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

• Florida joins the school choice party. / via 74 Million

  • Related, school choice continues to spread. 3 things to know. / via Education Week

• Khanmigo migrates to Azure, will be free for teachers to use (but will still carry a cost to deploy to students). Last week I mentioned how impressed I was that Khan Academy managed to feature in both OpenAI and Google’s end-of-spring AI press conferences. Seems all this commotion may have made Microsoft jealous! (I can’t quite tell from the announcement whether Microsoft won this set of Khan Academy’s infrastructure services from another cloud provider or OpenAI. Either way, it feels notable.) / via VentureBeat

• Oakland’s new, electric school bus fleet will also power homes. / via Bloomberg

Higher Ed

• University of California lecturer quits after learning her TA would be paid more than her. / via Chronicle of Higher Education

• Johns Hopkins says “hold my beer” to the University of Arizona, finding a $1B “discrepancy” in the medical school’s operating budget. / via Times Higher Education

• NCAA to pay $2.8B in damages to former athletes who were not allowed to profit from their name, image, and likeness. Seems like only a matter of time until the elite football and basketball programs break away from everyone else. / via Chronicle of Higher Education

Workforce

• 2U withdraws from government-sponsored bootcamp contract in the UK. Not just a financial move; it sounds like this program was marred by bad outcomes. / via FE News

• When business is just a game. While complicated to do well, video games and simulations remain one of the most exciting parts of the EdTech world. / via Bloomberg

• What entry-level jobs really look like today. / via Wall Street Journal

• Historically, most technology shifts came from the bottom up. The C Suite was often last to embrace tools like Slack and Zoom. The AI adoption curve is happening in reverse. The C Suite has been the early adopter, stressing out the teams underneath them. / via HR Dive

• Pearson says GenAI could save 78 million hours of work a week. The gauntlet has been thrown. Will anyone be brave enough to declare 100 million work hours saved by AI? We’ve officially entered the Liar’s Dice stage of the AI hype cycle. / via PRNewswire

EdTech

• Generative AI is best at something teachers need the least. “The larger issue here is that technologists are building towards generative AI’s strengths rather than teacher and learner needs.” / via Mathworlds

• Further proof that no one knows anything about AI and we’re just making up the rules as we go: 2 Emory students win $10K cash prize *from Emory* for creating AI homework help tool. Emory then suspends students because tool “could be used for cheating.” / via Wall Street Journal

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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

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