The EdSheet Vol. 14

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!

I hope many of you were able to take yesterday off to celebrate Juneteenth! Two programming notes before we get to the news:

1. July 4th holiday: The next EdSheet will be July 10th (we’re taking the week off for theJuly 4th holiday in the US)

2. Reader Survey: I need your help to make The EdSheet better! Every survey submission helps me better understand who you are and, in turn, what you are interested in reading about.

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

• Knowunity raises €27M / Germany, Test Prep (AI Tutor) / XAnge, Portfolion, Isomer Capital, Project A, Redalpine, Educapital

• WorkWhile raises $23M / US, Recruiting Software / Rethink Impact, Khosla Ventures and Reach Capital. Citi Impact Fund, GingerBread Capital, Illumen Capital

• Principia raises $15M (+ $20M in debt) / Brazil, Student Financing Solutions / Valor Capital Group

• GyanDhan raises $6M / India, Student Financing Solutions / Classplus, Pravega Ventures

• Prepia raises €1.5M / Serbia, Test Prep / Inova, Silicon Gardens

M&A

• Pearson acquires eDynamic Learning / UK, 

• TAL Education acquires Epic! / China (US), 

• Wolters Kluwer acquires IntelliLearn / US (Australia), Courseware (Nursing)

• Colegium acquires KidsBook / Chile, Content Provider

• Shape Robotics acquires Sanako Oy / Denmark, Language Learning

VC Funds

• Collab Capital raises $75M / US, Future of Work

This summer, we’re 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.

What’s on your Whiteboard? Journeys into EdTech

• Clever CEO Trish Sparks shares her journey into EdTech and expanding Clever’s international reach

• Former Common Sense Media communications head, Natalia Battaglia shares her perspective on coming back to Whiteboard Advisors and today’s communications landscape. She recently (re)joined our team as an SVP of Communications.

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

• Sam Altman is “kid-pilled” now. Which means the product roadmap for those with kids between 0 and 2 is about to get pretty good.

• Unfortunately, new ChatGPT features will not solve the childcare gap in states like New Mexico. Both US presidential campaign | platforms included childcare as focus issues, and President Trump brings up the topic | intermittently (though Head Start was on the chopping block), but there is still no real consensus from industry or policy folks on what “good” looks like here.

K12

• The Big Sleep: As important as it is to discuss matters of pedagogy, content, and assessment, this is a reminder that holistic measures - like nutrition, physical and mental health opportunities, and sleep - often play just as big a role in successful child development.

  • Related, if you’re still unconvinced, try reading about Singapore’s private tutoring boom and the intense burnout it is causing in their students.

• 100 students in a school meant for 1,000: Chicago’s empty schools. Further (sad) details on the quagmire of Chicago’s public school system.

Higher Ed

• Workforce Pell continues to wind its way towards approval: the doomerism in this article is exhausting. Will there be problems - including, but not limited to, waste and fraud - with workforce Pell? Yes. But the status quo is not great either - facing record debt and delinquency, questions over ROI, and full of its own problems with waste and fraud. Experimentation is good. The rules will get better with more real-world test cases.

• The commercial side of international student recruitment is not in a good place. IDP, one of relatively few providers that provide public data on their business (they are publicly traded in Australia), dramatically downgraded their outlook all over the world.

  • Related, Yale rushes to sell billions of dollars worth of private equity stakes. Yale’s move is not just related to uncertainty over international student recruitment (let alone international campuses) - concerns over endowment taxes, research grants, etc. contributed too. Managing a university balance sheet was already complicated, now it is even more so.

• University of Florida board rejects sole finalist for president role. Post-vote, UF Board Vice-chair pens op-ed outlining his fury that Florida Man was not considered for the position.

  • More seriously, this vote further illustrates how spot-on the Chronicle was comparing the university president job hunt to a political campaign. Neither Santa Ono nor the UF board managed this campaign well.

Workforce

• Youth unemployment is up. The peanut gallery, goaded by the AI guys, is worried that entry-level jobs are going away forever. The youth are doomed to fritter away their lives playing esports or making Youtubes. 

  • Unless? New technologies naturally prioritize expertise until core primitives are in place, then access expands widely (that is, we hire senior developers during periods of technology change, junior developers when they stabilize). In 2019, at the peak of the cloud development era, only 15% of Y Combinator founders had post-graduate degrees - expertise was not the priority. This year, over 60% of Y combinator founders had a post-graduate degree.

  • Also, just so we’re clear, the jobs that AI is taking away stink. The AI company that “wants to take your job” says their job is “like creating a very boring video game.”

  • My point is, entry level jobs are not going away. I will happily bet that there will be more people working more interesting jobs in 10 years than there are today.

Looking for your next opportunity in education? Check out our W/A Jobs, which features 3,648 career opportunities from 304 organizations across the education industry. A few roles that we’re excited about from the past week:

• Amira Learning is hiring a remote Creative AI Specialist to lead the integration of generative AI, instructional design, and automation in content creation workflows

• BrainPOP is hiring a New York-based Project Manager to support the company’s product team

• ETU is hiring a remote VP of Sales to own the company’s sales activities in their designated territory

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/political dynamics into insights that inform decision-making. Reply to this email to learn more.