Hello!

The Memorial Day Weekend fast approaches in the US, a signal that the school year is coming to an end and QA season is about to begin for EdTech companies preparing for the fall. 

Also hoping to launch new features this fall? This newsletter. Over the next few editions, you will see a survey at the top. This survey lets me understand who you are and, in turn, the content you might be interested in. I will be forever grateful if you take the time to fill it out!

With that, onto the news!

Funding / M&A

Whiteboard Advisors not only provides policy and market-related diligence and advisory services, we track every financial transaction that happens in education — and keep a record of all deals that are publicly announced.

The following transactions caught our eye over the past few weeks. If you have a deal to announce, or would like access to the full transactions database, please reach out.

Venture Funding

• Amboss raises $260M / US, Test Prep / KIRKBI, M&G Investments, Lightrock 

• Manabie raises $23M / Singapore, LMS / JIC Venture Growth, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, Hulic, Zoshinkai Holdings

• Doinstruct raises €16.5M / Germany, Corporate Training / HV Capital, Creandum, High Tech Grunderfonds  

• Klara raises €10M / France, Talent Management (Skills Platform) / Endeit Capital, 

• Ubimaster raises €7M / Germany, Tutoring / Owl Ventures, Bayern Kapital, amberra, Auxxo, Zanichelli Ventures, MPA Capital

• Skillvue raises $6.3M / Italy, Talent Management / 360 Capital, Italian Founders Fund, 14Peaks Capital, Orbita Verticale

• Poppins raises €5M / France, Special Education / Racine, Bpifrance Patient Autonome fund, Eurazeo, Kurma Partners, BNP Paribas Développement, Verve Ventures

• Alice raises €4.2M / Denmark, Tutoring / Cherry Ventures, Y Combinator

• Capably raises $4M /

• Revision Dojo raises $3.4M / US, Test Prep / 468 Capital, Acacia Group, Amino, Corenest Capital, Exitfund, Goodwater Capital, ISeed, Lombard Street Ventures, Orange Collective, Team Ignite, Transpose Platform, Y Combinator

• Ropes raises $3.1M / US, Talent Management / GSV Ventures, Box Group

• Dex raises £2.3M / UK, Hiring Platform / A16Z, Concept Ventures

• PyxiScience raises €2M / France, Content Provider (Math) / Newfund, Invess Île-de-France Amorçage (managed by INCO Ventures), BPI France

• Medly AI raises $1.7M / Test Prep / Eka Ventures, Ada Ventures

• Evolytes raises €1.3M / Iceland, Content Provider (Math) / Omega, Pekron Family Office, 

• Tutornow raises €1M / Italy, Tutoring / Techstars, Invitalia, Kf-invest

M&A

• Accenture acquires Ascendient Learning / US, Training Platform

• Echo360 acquires GoReact / US, HED Infrastructure

• Acorns acquires EarlyBird / US, Content Provider (Financial Literacy)

• Panorama Education acquires Class Companion / US, HED Infrastructure

Buyouts

• Avathon Capital acquires Oculus IT / US, HED Infrastructure

What’s on your Whiteboard: CEO Perspectives

• BetterLesson CEO Matthew Kennard shares his perspective on the US K12 market for professional development software and services

• Securly CEO Tammy Wincup talks about the necessary balance between physical and digital in the K12 school of the future

This summer, Whiteboard Advisors is teaming up with ISTE+ASCD to co-host the third annual Solutions Summit, a gathering for edtech executives, product leaders, and entrepreneurs driving innovation in education.

Taking place on Sunday, June 29, at the first-ever co-located ISTELive and ASCD Annual Conference in San Antonio, Texas, the Solutions Summit offers a unique space to explore what’s needed to design effective, scalable tools that support educators and learners.

This year’s program will spotlight AI infrastructure, cutting-edge research, and market signals shaping the future of education technology. Through hands-on workshops and expert-led discussions—including by Whiteboard Advisors' very own David DeSchryver and Anna Edwards—participants will dig into the building blocks of high-impact solutions and share insights that bridge product design with instructional practice.

News of Note

This section is intended to be more exploratory, a reflection of stories I think are important and ideas/trends I’m contemplating. It is free today, but will be going behind a paywall soon.

K12

• Mississippi can't possibly have good schools: “I’m not saying we should go “full Finland” and turn Mississippi into a junket destination and object of hero worship. It’s not perfect. But we need to celebrate their thoughtful statewide strategy that has dramatically improved results without a colossal increase in spending. Their progress is not a fluke. It’s a clue.”

  • Apropos of (non-Mississippi) school districts struggling to make tough decisions, as enrollment falls, fewer schools close. It stinks when a school has to close, but the rationale driving this counterintuitive trend is more head-in-the-sand than data-driven decision making 

• House Republicans set aside $5B for tax credit scholarships: Tax credit scholarships continue to gain steam, as predicted by my Whiteboard colleagues in the wake of November’s election.

  • Also, New Hampshire expands Education Freedom Account program, raising the student cap to 5,400 students (with a path to 12,500 next year) and eliminating the income cap for participating in the program. 

• “Right now, there are no education goals for the country.” In the Age of Average, where many (most?) industries are converging towards universal design, options abound in education. Often, that is a good thing! Still, I relate to this statement from former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, and wish there was a stronger, national, bipartisan consensus on the expected outcomes of public education. 

  • Speaking of, how about we include personal finance and computer science? Right now, less than a quarter of high school students receive financial literacy instruction in high school. And, while hundreds of brand-name CEOs think computer science should be part of high school curriculums, only 12 states have codified it.

  • Additionally, Randi Weingarten says not everyone has to go to college. Please note, this is not an argument against any form of post-secondary education, just the traditional college degree. The world continues to grow more complex - today’s young people need more training (in many shapes and sizes), not less.

Higher Ed

• What is the modern university? I have, repeatedly, returned to this question over the years. During the Biden administration, my reflections centered on the proactive approaches schools were taking to future-proof themselves (or spend their way into oblivion). The story has changed dramatically since President Trump took over, with most universities now deeply on the defensive. 

  • This is not for lack of trying, as universities ramped up lobbying spend dramatically in Q1 2025.

  • Unfortunately, that increased lobbying spend has not translated to short-term results. President Trump continues to challenge the tax status of universities, House Republicans continue to push an increase to 2017’s Endowment Tax and student loan reforms, and executive | orders | are | flying (figuratively, EWR is still in trouble). 

    • Not your father’s Republican Party: The tax status challenge and endowment tax increase are sexy media topics, but don’t actually impact the system that much. ~50 universities paid the endowment tax last year and the increase would impact only 35 of those 50. Still, it is interesting to watch the Republican Party advocate for increased taxes and cost controls on education. Reagan-era Republican principles of tax breaks and deregulation remain the standard in other sectors, but this trend bears watching.

  • That said, there are some trying to turn chaos into opportunity. The UNC system is exploring the creation of their own accrediting agency. Accreditors have an incentive problem, where their sustainability is dependent on fees from the organizations they are charged with regulating - a core part of why only 18 institutions (<1% of a pool of 4,000+) have lost accreditation in the past 25 years. Unfortunately, neither de-regionalization nor this proposal from the UNC system solve this incentive problem.

• CUNY’s ASAP program starts scaling: In 2007, the City University of New York (CUNY) piloted the Accelerated Study in Associate Program (ASAP), immediately seeing positive results. Since then, the ASAP program has continued to be tested and, in the past few years, scaled across institutions. This year, at least $100M in grants - in North Carolina ($35M.6M) and Colorado ($20M) - and venture funding - for Campus ($46M) - has been announced where ASAP plays a core role.

• Walmart heirs to start new university: Apropos of nothing, many of the “robber barons” of the late 1800s/early 1900s - Vanderbilt, Stanford, Hopkins, Carnegie, Rockefeller (2X) - established universities as vehicles for an enduring legacy. It's funny to me that today’s billionaire class, while similarly philanthropic, seems much more focused on their (also often eponymous) personal charities. Are personal charities better or worse than new universities? I honestly don’t know, but it does make this Walmart-clan announcement stick out.

  • One possible explanation? A personal charity allows for much more individual control than a university, including the ability to wind it down.

Workforce

• Trump sends mixed signals on apprenticeships: The messaging may be confusing, but apprenticeships remain one of relatively few areas of bipartisan consensus - I would love to see increased investment in them become a way for congress to put legislative points on the board.  

Other

• Awareness of the AI cheating crisis grows: The “AI cheating crisis” drives me nuts as a topic, but this was one of the more thoughtfully sober perspectives on the impact of AI that I’ve read recently. 

  • My own perspective on the “crisis”? That there is a lot of “do as I say, not as I do” going on.

• Chegg layoffs continue: Very hard to see how Chegg climbs out of this doom loop. I thought that the breadth and specificity of course support that Chegg provides would be far more defensible than it turned out to be. If the coursework questions were this AI-able^TM, how soon does the rest of the course IP become so too?

  • Of note, the public markets may be ice cold on the subject, but the venture market remains interested in homework help. No fewer than 6 companies have raised venture money for tutoring and test prep in the past month (see above), including Amboss’ gigantic, $260M round.

• Also on the EdTech struggle bus? Anthology. Their problems are primarily financial - driven by a buyout at a peak, COVID-era valuation - rather than existential though. The most likely outcome is a change in ownership relatively soon. Prior investors will get burned, but I would be surprised to see a dramatic change in the company’s prospects 

Looking for your next opportunity in education? Check out our W/A Jobs, which features 3,643 career opportunities from 284 organizations across the education industry. A few roles that we’re excited about from the past week:

• The Strada Education Foundation is looking for a remote Summer Associate on their Strategic Investments team to support the team’s portfolio and investment processes

• iDesign is looking for a Dallas-based Project Manager / Scrum Master to support the team’s Agile project management efforts

• Graduation Alliance is looking for a Detroit-based Enrollment Advisor to support the organization’s recruiting efforts near their Detroit campus

Whiteboard Advisors is the leading policy-related diligence partner for education investors, advising on most major private equity transactions in education over the past 15 years. Our specialty is translating complex policy dynamics into insights that inform decision-making. Reply to this email to learn more.