Hello! 

Startup founders: Last chance to submit your applications for the Global EdTech Startup Awards (GESA)!

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.

For everyone else, some of the topics covered in this newsletter:

• European EdTech is up: With the announcement of Lingokids’ $120M venture round last week, European companies now occupy the top 4 largest EdTech venture rounds of 2025.

• Teen Mental Health is on the rise: A bright light amidst declining NAEP scores and debates over AI usage and cell phone bans.

• Higher ed enrollments are up: A trend no one would have predicted 2 years ago, when the conversation revolved around the demographic cliff, pandemic uncertainty, and general questioning of the value of college

• Workforce optimism is down: leading some to question not only the value of college, but the entire American Dream

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

• Lingokids raises $120M / Spain, Content Provider / Bullhound Capital, General Catalyst, Nextalia Ventures: Madrid-based Lingokids offers a variety of first- and third-party branded content geared towards 2-8 year-olds. As noted by the team at Brighteye Ventures, European EdTech is hot right now. Headed into Q4, the top 4 publicly announced venture rounds of 2025 have all been European-headquartered - Amboss, Lingokids, Sdui, and Animag. (India’s Leap rounds out the top 5.) 

• Vocal Image raises $3.6M / Estonia, Training Provider / Educapital, Specialist VC, Generations Fund: Tallinn-based Vocal Image offers AI-enabled voice coaching services. The company, which has scaled to $12M+ in revenue, adds another success story to the increasingly | popular Youtube-channel-to-EdTech-platform pathway.

• We Are Learning raises €2.3M / Norway, Instructional Design / Andenes Ventures, DNV, MP Pensjon: Oslo-based We Are Learning offers a course-authoring platform for corporate learning. The funding from this round will be used to expand internationally.

• Cadmus raises new funding (amount not disclosed) / UK, Assessment / SEEK Investments, Glitch Capital: Melbourne-based Cadmus offers an assessment platform to universities. Trying to predict the future of assessments is hard given the pace of change in AI, but I appreciate the philosophy behind Cadmus’ approach. The company aims to “build a holistic assessment platform that helps improve students’ learning outcomes while AI is used properly—rather than trying to ‘catch out’ students with tools that aren’t always accurate.”

M&A

• Workday acquires Sana for $1.1B / US (Sweden), Workplace Tools: There is a trend here, where many of the breakout winners of the Workforce Education space from the past ~5 years have evolved to be far more Workforce than Education. When I wrote about Sana’s Series B a little over 2 years ago, the company’s value proposition prominently featured their take on a Learning Management System (LMS). Education is mentioned briefly in Workday’s acquisition announcement, but this acquisition appears to be far more driven by Sana’s advances in workplace automation. 

• Workday acquires Paradox / US, Talent Management: Busy summer for the Workday corporate development team! Of note, Workday Ventures was already an investor in both Paradox and Sana prior to the acquisitions. 

• Sdui acquires Educamos / Germany (Spain), Higher Ed Software Infrastructure: Educamos will be integrated into Sdui’s Additio App, which the company acquired in 2023. 

• Kami acquires Book Creator / New Zealand (UK), Content Platform: Kami’s first platform acquisition after last year’s growth investment from BV Investment Partners. I would not be surprised to see a few more over the next ~24 months. 

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.

What’s on your Whiteboard? CEO Perspectives

• Avi Warshavsky, CEO of MindCET, shares his perspective on how to start and grow a successful global edtech company

• Holman Gao, CEO of Boost My School, shares the road to raising $10M+ in venture funding

News of Note

This section is intended to be more exploratory, a reflection of stories, ideas, and trends that I think are important for EdTech executives and investors to be aware of. 

ECE

• Brain development for reading starts long before kindergarten. A further reminder that investing in early childhood education leads to better economic outcomes.   

• Which is a platform NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani can get behind.

• Just don’t make childcare costs your rationale for declining birth rates.

K12

• American students are getting dumber. An ugly but effective headline to make a point about falling NAEP scores.

• Further stressing the lives of our young people (and their parents), the MAHA debate over what foods are actually good for you.

• However, there are bright spots. Strategies that resonate, both intuitively and empirically, for improving test scores and well-being. Such as, HIIT for kids! 

• Also, the teens are coming out of their funk. They are not, to be clear, “better.” But it is heartening to see an improvement of any size in teen mental health.

• Which makes the phone ban | conversation all the more interesting. Some form of ban seems to be the most likely outcome across the U.S., though it is not yet clear what level of government these bans will rest on.

• And also makes the rise and global expansion of China’s Squirrel AI worth watching. Squirrel AI is one of the most unabashedly pro-digital education businesses I have read about in a long time. Setting aside personal beliefs, there is a clarity and directness to Squirrel’s messaging that is almost refreshing as most AI companies blanket their beliefs in a sea of caveats.

Higher Ed

• Fall 2025’s unexpected enrollment success. These enrollment gains are not perfectly distributed, but are more optimistic than any postsecondary commentator was expecting 2-3 years ago.

• Also contributing to this optimism, the accreditors are waking up. Recognizing that there is a more proactive role they can play in the higher ed ecosystem.Two noteworthy moves from two separate accreditors in the past two weeks: NECHE to accredit non-credit certificates while WASC will accredit apprenticeship provider OpenClassrooms.

• Adding further wind to the sails of enrollment optimism are targeted philanthropic initiatives. Billionaires like the Arnold family and Mackenzie Scott are investing in the scaling of CUNY’s ASAP initiative and the United Negro College Fund (UNCF), respectively, rather than putting their names on buildings at elite universities.   

Workforce

• Optimism is up in higher ed, but down in the workforce space, with Americans losing faith that hard work leads to economic gains.

• Even among the college educated, who are the newest face of long-term unemployment.

• Especially the recently graduated, who are struggling to land jobs in their field of study and feeling unprepared even once they get there.

• Leading more and more folks to consider: Am I an AI doomer?

• Or, perhaps worse, do my colleagues know me for my “Workslop”?

Looking for your next opportunity in education? Check out our W/A Jobs, which features 3,418 career opportunities from 312 organizations across the education industry. A few roles that we’re excited about from the past week:

• Hack The Box is hiring a remote Business Development Representative to support the company’s go-to-market function

• Code.org is hiring a remote Senior Product Manager to lead the product function within the organization’s incubator

• Emeritus is hiring a remote Assistant Manager for Product Marketing to own Product Marketing, Communications, and Operations for a subset of the company’s programs

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.