Hello! 

It was great to see many of you in New York at HolonIQ this week. If we missed each other, please let me know next time you are visiting the Bay Area.

Startup founders: The Global EdTech Startup Awards (GESA) are in full swing, and the application deadline is around the corner!

For those unfamiliar, GESA is the longest-running, most prestigious global EdTech competition, vetting more than 8,000 startups over the past 11 years. It is free to apply and open to all early-stage startups.

Learn more about the awards and submit your application by September 30.

Also, a few key topics from this newsletter:

• NAEP results continue to decline: A sad, though not entirely unexpected outcome.

• Universities shift revenue strategies: amidst demographic shifts, enrollment turmoil, and in response to funding pressure from the Trump administration.

• OpenAI wants to get you hired: one of the company’s first big bets at the application layer of the software stack and in partnership with several of the world’s largest employers.

With that, on to 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

• Sdui raises €95M / Germany, K12 Software Infrastructure / Bain Capital, HV Capital, High-Tech Gründerfonds

• Wooclap raises $29M / Belgium, Instructional Design / Impact Expansion

• TERN raises $24M / UK, Recruitment Platform / Notion Capital

• The Invigilator raises $11M / South Africa, Assessment (Exam Integrity)

• Boost My School raises $10M / US, K12 Software Infrastructure / High Alpha, Far Out VC, ground game, Allos Ventures

• Yourway Learning raises $9M / US, K12 Software Infrastructure / Greybull Stewardship

• Matiks raises $3.1M / India, Gamified Learning (Math) / Tanglin Ventures, Info Edge Ventures

• Hubert raises €2.5M / Sweden, Recruitment Software / Spintop Ventures

M&A

• Workday acquires Paradox / US, Recruitment Platform

• Banyan Software acquires Zap Solutions / US, HED Recruiting Software

• Impact Futures Group acquires Captiva Learning / UK, Apprenticeships

• Arcade acquires Upduo / US, Corporate Training (Sales)  

Buyouts

• Providence Equity Partners acquires Modern Campus / US, Higher Ed Software Infrastructure

Apply Now for The 11th Annual GESA Competition

Applications are now open for the 11th annual Global EdTech Startup Awards competition (GESA), the world's largest and most prestigious competitions for early-stage education ventures.

For over a decade, GESA has provided a global stage for the most promising entrepreneurs shaping the future of learning. GESA’s network spans 135+ countries and includes partnerships with organizations like AWS and events like SXSW EDU and Bett, connecting founders with the investors, mentors, and partners they need to scale their impact.

Past winners have collectively raised over $500M and reached millions of learners worldwide.

The deadline for applications is Tuesday, September 30th, 2025. The competition is open to early-stage EdTech startups from around the globe.

*This message is sponsored by the Global EdTech Startup Awards.

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

• More and more state-level experimentation in the early childcare space, as New Mexico becomes first state to offer universal childcare. 

• There is no real, established path for these state-level solutions yet, which means we’ll need many examples to draw from. What the military gets right about child care.

• The most important variable in all this: labor. How do we square paying providers living wages while keeping tuition costs low enough for the average American family?

K12

• NAEP results continue to decline. A sad, though not entirely unexpected, result.

• Related? Tutoring was supposed to save American kids after the pandemic. The results are sobering.

• Also not helping test scores, school district insolvency on the rise.

• Also stressing public school finances, states struggle with rise in special education complaints.

• Not traditionally thought about when it comes to public school finances, but a key part of operations: school lunches. “If [school cafeterias] were a restaurant chain, they would be the largest in the country.”

• How do we fix all this bad/sad news? To start, maybe we need to encourage our elected officials to make education more of a priority.

  • Caveat that there is no silver bullet, this will take time. The returns to education are linear.

Higher Ed

• As uncomfortable as this year’s university research funding freeze has been, the pressure may be driving some novel revenue strategies at universities.

• Some of these are direct replacement strategies, with schools like Georgia Tech leading the way in shifting research funding development from federal dollars towards corporate dollars.

• Other changes are less direct, but still relevant to topline revenue. Rice University is entering Fall 2025 with its largest class ever. Filled, in part, by a late-summer run of admitting students of their waitlist.

  • Recruiting more international students as a strategy is still TBD, though.

• And, Northeastern to launch student-run experiential learning cafe in partnership with Follett and Saxbys. Differentiation matters! 

• For more on this, 20 Higher Ed trends to watch from Kanahoma. 

Workforce

• OpenAI wants to get you hired. Take note, OpenAI continues to telegraph that they believe the value of AI will accrue at the application layer while the infrastructure layer gets commoditized. This is a stark difference from the SAAS era, where Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and other big tech players focused mostly on infrastructure.

• If AI and workers were strong complements, what would we see? “One job that AI has created is for pundits who predict what jobs AI will take.”

Other

• Are we living in a stupidogenic society? Not sure about stupidogenic as a term, but an interesting intellectual argument.

Looking for your next opportunity in education? Check out our W/A Jobs, which features 3,550 career opportunities from 310 organizations across the education industry. A few roles that we’re excited about from the past week:

• Lumi is hiring a remote Sales Decathlete to support the company’s go-to-market organization.

• WorkHero is hiring a remote Growth Marketer to own growth strategy for the organization

• Handshake is hiring a San Francisco-based Senior Strategy & Operations Manager to provide support across business functions

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.