The EdSheet Vol. 17

This newsletter covers the business side of the education industry - venture funding, M&A, other financial transactions. Whiteboard Advisors also publishes a daily newsletter - What We’re Reading - of curated, industry-focused news clips and a weekly newsletter - and  Whiteboard Notes - which covers policy, industry trends, and insights from W/A CEO Ben Wallerstein.

Hello!

Back-to-School season is upon us! This is my favorite time of year, trying to keep up with new product releases, partnerships being tested, and, most importantly, new student expectations after a summer spent away from the classroom.

If you are an EdTech company hiring into the Fall Rush, I encourage you to consider bringing on an EdTech MBA Fellow. 

And, if you are interested in a deeper-dive discussion of new student, faculty, and administrator expectations as more universities adopt and embrace AI tools, I hope you’ll join me, The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Rick Seltzer, Auburn University Biggio Center Executive Director Asim Ali, California State University CIO Tara Hughes, and Adobe’s Dhruva Chandrasekhar next Tuesday (8/12) at 130pm ET. 

In the meantime, a few of the key topics for you to chew on from this newsletter:

• The Back-to-School AI wars: No fewer than 3 education-related updates from the major model providers in the past few weeks, capped off by OpenAI’s release of GPT-5 earlier today.

• Where investors should turn their attention now that OBBB is law: In a word, Texas. Which is allocating public funding to both school choice initiatives ($1B to ESA programs in 2026) and public school operating budgets (to the tune of $32,000 per teacher for the state’s best teachers)

• The changing role of university leaders: The president, and state leaders around the country, are increasingly scrutinizing university leaders for ideological compliance, with several recent examples of university presidents being pushed out of their jobs.  

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

• Positive Development raises $51.5M / US, Special Education / aMoon Fund, B Capital, Flare Capital Partners, Healthworx, Digitalis Ventures

• Arivihan raises $4.17M / India, AI Tutor / Prosus, Accel, GSF Investors

• Ucademy raises €3.5M / Spain, Test Prep

M&A

• Hyve Group acquires GSV Summit / UK (US), Education Media

• Thrive acquires Guider / UK, Corporate LMS (Coaching)

• Dukes Education acquires Mandoulides Schools / UK (Greece), K12 School Provider

• Year13 acquires Student Edge / Australia, Career Development

Buyouts

• Brightstar Capital acquires 50% stake in Arden University / UK, Degree Provider

What’s on your Whiteboard? Search Funds

• Theodore Sutherland, CEO of Sage Blacksmith, shares his experience raising an education-focused search fund and how he looks for great companies in under-appreciated training niches.

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

• States creating trust funds to bolster childcare and early childhood education. For those not following along with the birth rate decline discourse, there is a massive mismatch between peak fertility and peak earning years, which creates a drag on both family creation and economic activity. These state trust funds for childcare are an exciting experiment in trying to remediate this problem

K12

• In the last EdSheet, we discussed the official start of the school choice era of US K12 education. The questions investors should be working on now are: when and where they should get involved?

  • The good news is OBBB established the broad strokes of how the federal tax credit scholarship will work and there are a number of organizations tracking further, state-level school choice policy decisions. The playing field is knowable.  

  • However, as noted by Marguerite Roza in the K12 funding webinar W/A hosted last week, we are still 2 years away from the federal tax credit scholarship going into effect and several years more before individual scholarship funds reach sufficient scale to move the market (due to the $1700/taxpayer contribution limit)

  • Which means there is a lot of tea-leaf reading going on. Are public schools closing or is the post-COVID private school enrollment boom slowing?

  • If you have to pick one state to watch amidst all this change, make it Texas. Starting next year, Texas will allocate $1B to education savings accounts that can be used for private school tuition and other educational expenses. At the same time, the state is allocating up to $32,000 per teacher for their best public school teachers. 

• Also of note, the Presidential Fitness Test is back. Unclear whether this decision will help or hurt public school enrollments.

• And, California increases investment to $4.5B/year in the Expanded Learning Opportunities Program, an initiative designed to slow or prevent “summer slide” among students.

• Finally, Alpha School continues to lead the league in media attention:student ratio. What some might see as an interesting, 200-student experiment in disentangling academic development with social-emotional development, others appear to see as an AI menace to be stamped out. The reality is probably somewhere in between.

Higher Ed

• Everything, everywhere, all at once. How Trump has upended higher ed finance in 2025. The title may be a little cliche, but, in this case, almost perfectly captures my feeling trying to keep up with this year’s education policy news, let alone trying to keep a large institution compliant with the changes. 

• Along similar lines, it is hard to articulate how quickly the job of college president is changing, particularly the leadership role(s) of major research universities. What used to be defined by fundraising prowess, research chops, and conservative (little c) stakeholder management of a large, decentralized community is now defined by…sudden death negotiations with the President of the United States?

  • Well, not always the president. It could also be their state governor. Santa Ono’s failed bid to become the next University of Florida president will likely go down as the canonical example of this, but the trend also claimed University of Virginia President James Ryan.

  • Or! A small, Conservative (big C) news outlet with a knack for driving mainstream headlines.

  • The result? A lot of higher education folks asking: Who’s going to want these university president jobs?

• To end on a lighter note, maybe everyone just needs to make more (human) friends? Emmanuel College now offers a Psychology course that urges students to make friends. 

Workforce

• The cities where you can actually get an entry-level job. I am on the record in my belief that AI will create more jobs than it destroys, but I don’t have a good perspective yet on how it will impact the geographic distribution of jobs. 

  • In addition to the cities mentioned in the above ADP data - Raleigh, Milwaukee, Baltimore, Austin, and Birmingham - don’t sleep on Pittsburgh as an emergent AI hub. 

• Preston Thorpe is a software engineer at a San Francisco startup — he’s also serving his 11th year in prison. People can accomplish wonderful things when given second chances. Good for Maine piloting this program, and good for the growing number of startups and non-profits helping current and former incarcerated people build careers.

Other

• Begun, the Back-to-School AI Wars have. In case you hadn’t heard, students use AI. A lot. (Possibly enough to make a visible impact on overall AI usage, but take that assertion with a grain of salt.) However, very few students are as committed to a single AI model/app as they are to, say, Y2Kcore.

  • As a result, Big AI is taking a page from the Publisher/LMS playbook and lining up | feature releases | for the start of the (US) school year. This strategy is very practical, but I can’t help but think there is an even bigger opportunity in amplifying some of the crazy, unexpected ways students and teachers are leveraging these tools rather than feature lists.

  • Such as? Winning a gold medal in math. 

• Cengage is looking for deals. McGraw Hill’s stock price may be down ~25% since their IPO 2 weeks ago, but does look like it is creating some positive pressure on other large education companies, like Cengage, to be more public with their strategic plans, if not their stock (CEO Michael Hansen downplayed any immediate plans for a Cengage IPO).

Looking for your next opportunity in education? Check out our W/A Jobs, which features 3,344 career opportunities from 304 organizations across the education industry. A few roles that we’re excited about from the past week:

• Teachable is hiring a New York-based Senior HR Business Partner to support the continued development of the company’s organizational design, talent management, employee relations, and performance management strategies

• Degreed is hiring a remote Key Account Director to own account relationships with a number of the organization’s most important global clients

• SchooLinks is hiring an Austin-based AP/AR specialist to own day-to-day vendor payments, customer invoicing, collections, and finance inbox support

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.