The EdSheet Vol. 13

As a reminder, this newsletter covers the business side of the education industry - venture funding, M&A, other financial transactions, and the news investors and business leaders should know about the market.

Hello!

Two programming notes this week:

1. I am looking forward to seeing many of you in Philadelphia tomorrow at Penn’s Catalyst Innovation Summit! Michael, John, Rita, and team run an amazing year-long program for education entrepreneurs that culminates with this event.

2. Whiteboard Advisors’ CEO Ben Wallerstein will be in the Bay Area next week, to meet with a number of W/A friends and clients. If you’ll be in town, please let us know!

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.

Funding

• Shakers raises €14M / Spain, Gig Economy / Partech, K Fund, Brighteye Ventures, Athos Capital, Wayra

• Didask raises €10M / France, Corporate Training / AVP, Citizen Capital, MAIF Impact, JunEx, Takara Capital

• Shikho raises $8M / India, Content Provider / Startup Bangladesh Limited

• Footprints raises $7.5M / India, Early Childhood Education Provider / Tanglin Venture Partners

• Spott raises $3.2M / US, Recruiting Software / Base10 Partners, Y Combinator, Fortino, True Equity

• The Corporate Governance Institute raises €3M / Ireland, Corporate Training / BVP

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

M&A

• IXL Learning acquires MyTutor / US (UK), Tutoring

• CodeHS acquires Tynker / US, Content Provider (Computer Science)

Buyouts

• Renvent Holdings and LeftRight Capital acquire CurriQunet / US, HED Infrastructure

VC Funds

• Zeal Capital raises $82M Fund II

Other Transactions

• Grammarly raises $1B in non-dilutive funding to drive strategic acquisitions 

• Attensi raises $25M in non-dilutive growth funding

• HTX Labs receives $5.8M grant to scale XR Training

What’s on your Whiteboard: AI in Talent Management

• HireEducation’s Jess Thibault opines on the changing nature of recruiting and how she leverages AI to do new and different tasks

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.

ECE

• LA to “offload” most preschools opened with American Rescue Plan funding: “ It’s really a bad idea to use one-time money for ongoing services.” A story that I expect, unfortunately, we’ll see more of heading into the next school year.

K12

• Miami turns from banning chatbots to embracing them districtwide: this mirrors a broader trend Securly CEO Tammy Wincup shared with me a few weeks ago, where schools are moving from banning AI tools to designing safeguarded environments for their usage.

• Houston ISD schools that adhere to New Education System to receive $3,500 more per student: the revamp of the previously struggling Houston K12 system has been one of the more public district turnaround efforts in recent memory. However, there have been some early positive signs, and I am intrigued by this incentive-based approach to getting schools to adopt new standards.

Higher Ed

• 2.2M American student loan borrowers’ credit scores lowered by > 100 points as student loan collections resume: This is sad. But also, we kinda need to have a functional loan system again? The best argument I’ve read on the subject is that we should have paired resumed loan collections with making student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy.

  • Related, I am also on the record as in favor of large-scale student debt relief after significantly constraining students’ ability to borrow (eliminating Parent PLUS loans and constraining Grad PLUS loans was one positive point in the “Big, Beautiful Bill”) and/or putting schools on the hook for bad loans. No shortcuts here, folks, even if/when the immediate situation makes us sad.   

• Can elite universities remain global? Thoughtful op-ed from Michael Horn that helped crystallize a theory for me: large universities, particularly large elite universities, have evolved over the past ~10 years to play a more active role in public discourse. The problem, which President Trump has brought into stark relief this year: “They have misread the nation.”  

  • Case in point? The Greek tragedy of Santa Ono’s failed bid to be the President of the University of Florida, which the Chronicle likened more to a political campaign than a job interview. At the heart of Ono’s campaign: transitioning from outlining a $250M+ plan to support diversity efforts at the University of Michigan to “I came to make sure [DEI] never returns [to the University of Florida]” in less than 2 years. (This is not a values judgement for or against DEI spending, but rather commentary on the almost-comical change of heart.)

Workforce

• Consultants are taking over the world’s corner offices: Provides just enough levity (“you want that McKinsey person on their second job out of McKinsey”) to take the analysis seriously for why strategy skills have taken center stage over the past 20 years. Also notes that Big Tech employees have not joined the CEO ranks in equal measure to consultants, or at least not yet. 

• AI is coming for entry-level jobs: Lots of hand-wringing over jobs where the “work” is code debugging, document review, and online return requests. All tasks that…kinda stink? The spike in senior hiring is very real, but I suspect it will re-normalize as the whole workforce gets comfortable with AI.

• DOL recommits to opinion letters: Opinion letters are not, as the article mentions, novel, but this is notable insofar as it becomes entrenched as a standard approach to interpreting the law.

Other

• ED hires Amber Northern as senior advisor to reform IES: Northern’s hire provides an important public face for the rebuilding of a department that lost 80% of its employees in February.

  • This hire is all the more important as the bill starts coming due on IES’ required annual reporting

• Rest of World puts most of the Byju’s details together in one place: A topic I have been | writing about since 2022. As bad as this situation got, I think the odds are pretty good that Byju will return with a new, well-funded EdTech company in the next ~5 years.

New Reports & Data

• The State of Higher Education in 2025

Looking for your next opportunity in education? Check out our W/A Jobs, which features 3,617 career opportunities from 303 organizations across the education industry. A few roles that we’re excited about from the past week:

• SchooLinks is hiring an Austin-based VP of Sales to lead the company’s sales organization

• GiveCampus is hiring a remote Business Intelligence Analyst to plan, build, and own the company’s Business Intelligence function

• 4MATIV is hiring a Saint Paul, Boston, or DC-based Head of Product Development to own and execute the company’s product development roadmap

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.