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 - Whiteboard Notes - which covers policy, industry trends, and insights from W/A CEO Ben Wallerstein.

Hello! 

Thanksgiving approaches, which means I am contemplating my annual end-of-year essay. I’d love your input on this essay - please feel free to send thoughts directly by hitting reply and/or filling out our 2025 end-of-year survey.

Looking forward to hearing from you, 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

• Flint raises $15M / US, K12 Instructional Materials / Basis Set Ventures, Patron, USC Viterbi, AME Cloud Ventures, Afore Capital, Y Combinator

• Joy raises $14M / US, Content Platform (Parenting) / Forerunner Ventures, Raga Partners, Magnify Ventures, Ingeborg Investments, Rogue Venture Partners, Next Legacy Partners

• Songscription raises $5M / US, Simulations (Training Provider) / Reach Capital, Emerge Capital, 10X Founders, Dent Capital

• WeWillWrite raises €2M / Norway, K12 Instructional Materials / Skyfall Ventures, Spintop Ventures

• CampusKnot raises $1.1M / US, Instructional Design / Tulane Ventures, Boot 64 Ventures, Invest Mississippi Impact Fund, Momentum Fund, Greaux Innovation Ventures

M&A

• Ellucian acquires Anthology’s SIS and ERP assets / US, HED Digital Infrastructure

• Kaltura acquires eSelf / US, HED Digital Infrastructure

• CareAcademy acquired by Activated Insights / US, Staffing Software

• Studiosity acquires Norvalid / Australia (Norway), Academic Integrity

• Wilson Language Training acquires Valley Speech / US, Literacy

Buyouts

• Achieve Partners invests in Beanstack / US, K12 Software Services

  • For a deep dive into Beanstack, check out my conversation with CEO Felix Lloyd (also linked below)

• Permira acquires The Key Group from CBPE / UK, K12 Software Infrastructure

IPOs

• PhysicsWallah closes IPO day up 44%. (And remains above IPO price.)

Nominate a Startup for the 2026 GSV Cup

Nominations are open for the 2026 GSV Cup: spotlighting the top 50 pre-seed and seed-stage startups transforming digital learning and workforce skills.

The GSV Cup is a highlight of the annual ASU+GSV Summit—connecting early-stage founders with the investors, partners, and leaders they need to scale their impact. Past honorees have raised $300M+ and reach millions of PreK to Gray learners worldwide.

The GSV Cup 50 will gain:

• Global spotlight: Exclusive demo time at the 2026 ASU+GSV Summit (April 12-15, San Diego) for 7,000+ "PreK to Gray" leaders

• Summit access: One complimentary registration

• Community & exposure: Join a powerful network of founders, investors, and education leaders across GSV’s expansive community

Submit your nominations by November 30, 2025. You can nominate yourself or be nominated by another company, user, partner, or investor!

What’s on your Whiteboard? CEO Perspectives

Purpose-Driven Pathways: The Next Era of College Admissions with Collegewise CEO Anjali Bhatia

From Teacher of the Year to CEO of EdTech Company Beanstack: A conversation with Felix Lloyd

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.

Early Childhood

• Capacity issues may limit New Mexico’s universal childcare program.

  • Related, Mamdani is building a universal childcare team for NYC, but faces daunting financial and logistical challenges.

  • And, what America can learn from England’s rocky child care rollout.

K12

• OpenAI rolls out ChatGPT for Teachers. Early reports suggest the application is focused on enterprise-grade security features and administrator controls. 

• What 3.3M text messages tell us about chronic absenteeism.

  • Related, lessons from a failed Texas tutoring program. TLDR: it wasn’t issues with the tutors or curriculum, but rather the logistics involved with delivering high-quality, high dosage tutoring.

  • On the other hand, Oakland’s MathBOOST tutoring program is delivering results.

• Florida’s radical education experiment. While much of the US returned to traditional schools post-COVID, a disproportionate number of Floridians have remained in the alternative school ecosystem, creating a hotbed of new models. 

  • Meanwhile, California is trying to reshape high school from within the traditional system.

  • And, New Jersey weighs ban on for-profit charter schools.

Higher Ed

• MacKenzie Scott donates $700M+ to HBCUs. On top of the $1.5B she donated in 2020-21. While Scott does not make these donations for the public “credit”, I wish she would get more praise for the speed and scale of this philanthropy.

• university enrollment trends pointing up for the fall, bucking “demographic cliff” expectations.

  • Leading the charge for this growth? Non-degree credentials, funded mostly out-of-pocket by students.

Workforce

• What even is a “good” job? There is a narrative problem in the conversation around the workforce, both present day and forward-looking. Media covering workforce development efforts almost always focus on blue collar industrial jobs while the typical American worker is more likely to be working a services jobs in home health, fast food, or retail. Unfortunately, too few of these services jobs meet the relatively minimal “good” standard of “pay[ing] a decent wage and fair treatment, some degree of autonomy and advancement opportunities.”

  • Related, Why AC is cheap, but AC repair is a luxury. 

• Slow Ventures’ soft skills finishing school for founders. 

Other

• There is much thought leadership on the potential perils of AI. Mass job displacement, a recipe for idiocracy, etc. I have a hunch that these fears might be driven by folks who don’t actually use AI that much. There is some new data that agrees with this hypothesis:

  • In an American University study of college students, students who don’t use/never use AI were 61% more likely to believe AI would limit their career opportunities compared to students who used AI regularly.

  • Further, the Economic Innovation Group’s recent survey of American workers found that the greatest predictor of whether a person thought AI was a threat to their career was whether or not they used AI tools. 

  • To be clear, I believe AI will impact jobs. Some, possibly many, people will go through a rough patch. I believe the solution to this problem is training and access to AI, not protectionism.

  • Also, for the record, while the adults debate the merits of AI and cell phone bans, the kids are policing themselves. Youtuber Hank Green’s Focus Friend app won Google’s App of the Year award for its approach to screen time management. Launched in August, the app has close to 2M downloads across the Apple and Google stores.

• What does “AI Literacy” actually mean? “There is something deeply unsettling about the ease with which policy-makers and the corporate class append “literacy” to virtually any developing trend when at the same time, many systems around the world are producing alarmingly low rates of actual literacy.”

Reports / Data

• The masterclass playbook for apprenticeships

• 2025 AI Search Trends report

• From Talent War to Talent Creation: Solving Healthcare’s Labor Shortage

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:

• Imagine Learning is hiring a remote Enterprise Systems Innovation Lead to Lead design and delivery of special projects that remove friction, automate manual work, or enable faster delivery across the organization’s technology systems

• Renaissance is hiring a remote Regional Vice President to provide leadership, direction, and resource stewardship to their assigned sales team

• The ECMC Foundation is hiring a remote Analyst for their Impact Investing team

• BONUS JOB for the young people in your life: Roadtrip Nation is looking for 3 18+ year-olds to travel across the country (in a giant green RV) to learn how AI is being used in interesting and inspiring ways

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.