The EdSheet Vol. 29

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! 

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Some of the things you’ll read about in this edition of The EdSheet:

• upGrad acquires Unacademy at an 85%+ markdown: One of the most significant transactions in India since Byju’s fell apart

• One of the best response to the EdTech backlash: may be outcomes-based contracting, which puts schools in the driver’s seat and companies on the hook for results.

• AI won't put you out of work — it'll just make your job harder: anecdata proliferates on this topic, but the argument is that AI is intensifying workloads more than eliminating them

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

Juicebox raises $80M at $850 million valuation / United States, Recruiting Platform / DST Global (lead), Sequoia, Coatue, Y Combinator, NFDG, Verified Capital 

Juicebox deploys autonomous recruiting agents to proactively identify and engage top job candidates. The company claims to have tripled its ARR since July 2025 and now serves 5,000 customers. This funding round will support product development, enterprise go-to-market, and the launch of a London office.

BusRight raises $30M / United States, Student Transportation Technology / Volition Capital (lead) 

BusRight provides an all-in-one platform for school district transportation departments, combining driver navigation, route optimization, real-time GPS tracking, student ridership visibility, and parent communication in a single system. The company frames itself as the technology backbone of the largest mass transit system in America — the 13,000 transportation departments that move 20 million students to school each day. The funds from this round will support the expansion of the platform's capabilities for student transportation operators.

Coral Care raises $13M / United States, In-Home Pediatric Therapy / Haymaker Ventures (lead), FCA Ventures, Peterson Ventures, Alleycorp, Reach Capital, Jefferson River Capital, Greymatter Capital, Mother Ventures, Charge Ventures

Coral Care connects families to licensed speech, occupational, and physical therapists who deliver services in the home, with proprietary software managing scheduling, documentation, billing, and credentialing. The proceeds from this round will fund expansion into Dallas, Houston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh.

Nectir raises $12.5M / United States, HED Software Infrastructure / Rethink Impact (lead), Gingerbread Capital, Strada, Long Journey Ventures, Entrada Ventures, Precursor Ventures, Behind Genius Ventures 

Nectir provides FERPA- and SOC 2-compliant AI infrastructure that allows colleges and universities to deploy LMS-integrated AI assistants for students, faculty, and administrators. The company is active in 100+ schools serving 80,000+ students, including the California Community Colleges system. The company is led by Kavitta Ghai, who started it as an undergraduate student at UC Santa Barbara after experiencing how traditional classroom environments left students without adequate support. The proceeds will fund international expansion and continued product development.

Giant raises $8M / United States, Interactive Storytelling / Matrix (lead), Decasonic, Griffin Gaming Partners, Perceptive Ventures, Flex Capital, LightShed Ventures, Arbitrum Gaming Ventures, Unpopular Ventures

Giant is an interactive storytelling platform that places children inside custom-built narratives as cartoon versions of themselves. Since launching in May 2025, the platform has generated 200,000+ personalized episodes and logged over 1 million minutes of engagement. CEO John Kobs previously founded Apartment List and led it for 14 years. The seed round will fund platform expansion and further user acquisition.

Pensive raises $6.8M / United States, HED Software Infrastructure / Mayfield (lead), Reach Capital, Anti Fund, Sequoia scout fund, a16z scout fund, Bass Ventures, Vela Partners 

Pensive is an AI-assisted grading platform for higher education that allows instructors to grade faster without sacrificing accuracy. The platform, which has processed 3M+ questions to date, is active across 100+ institutions including UC Berkeley, Columbia, and Arizona State. The proceeds from this round will go towards building features to support deep learning and critical thinking, and the company's goal of giving every student access to personalized academic support.

Talvy raises $2M / United States, Recruiting Platform / Link Ventures

Talvy replaces the traditional text resume with short-form video profiles that convey a candidate's communication style, energy, and interpersonal presence to employer partners. In a novel twist, Talvy has also developed a "Talvy Spotlight" program that champions high-caliber candidates to hiring managers in the Talvy network and features them on a billboard in Times Square (you know the one). The funding from this round will go towards further product development and user acquisition.

M&A

upGrad acquires Unacademy / India, Online Program Providers

This deal marks one of the most significant consolidations in India's edtech sector since the fall of Byju’s. Unacademy, which peaked at a $3.5 billion valuation in 2021, was acquired at a valuation reportedly below $500 million — an 85%+ markdown. The deal combines upGrad's professional upskilling and lifelong learning focus with Unacademy's consumer-facing test prep business.

Fullmind acquires Elevate K-12 / United States, K12 Degree Provider 

This merger creates what Fullmind calls the nation's largest dedicated virtual K-12 education provider. Fullmind focuses on homebound instruction, IEP and special education support, and summer programming, while Elevate K-12 brings live, state-certified-teacher-led instruction and an embedded on-site program manager model. The combined entity will serve 225+ school districts, with Elevate's teacher network and program managers now available to Fullmind districts and vice versa. Fullmind CEO Ysiad Ferreiras will lead the combined organization.

sofatutor acquires SchoolMouv / Germany / France, Online K-12 Learning 

Germany-based sofatutor — which serves 2M users with learning videos and interactive exercises — has acquired French competitor SchoolMouv as part of a broader international expansion push. SchoolMouv, which also offers video-based tutoring products, reaches 3M students in France. SchoolMouv will continue operating as an independent brand with its own management.

CampusWorks and Dynamic Campus merge / United States, Higher Education Technology Consulting 

CampusWorks and Dynamic Campus both specialize in managed IT services and strategic technology support for higher education institutions. CampusWorks, founded in 1999, brings 240+ employees and a track record spanning U.S. and Canadian colleges and universities; Dynamic Campus, backed by Atlantic Street Capital, claims to be the largest vendor-neutral provider of technology outsourcing in the higher ed sector. The merger is driven by what the companies describe as the growing complexity of the higher education technology landscape.

QuickStart acquires IronCircle / United States, Cybersecurity Workforce Training 

QuickStart, a cybersecurity workforce development and talent marketplace, has acquired IronCircle, an AI-powered training platform that deploys adaptive AI agents — called "IronCircle Operatives" — to simulate real-world cyber threats and deliver tailored instruction to employees. The combined company positions itself as the largest integrated cyber training ecosystem focused on workforce readiness, expanding QuickStart's ability to prepare, validate, and deploy cyber talent into real-world roles.

Quizlet acquires AnswersAI / United States, Study Tools 

Quizlet — the 20-year-old flashcard and study platform serving 300+ million learners — has acquired AnswersAI, a viral AI note-taker that converts lectures, audio, video, and documents into organized notes, flashcards, quizzes, and podcasts. The AnswersAI team joins the also recently acquired Coconote in extending Quizlet's recently announced push into AI products.

Major League Hacking acquires DEV / United States, Developer Education & Community

Major League Hacking, best known for organizing thousands of collegiate hackathons and running the MLH Fellowship — a paid software engineering apprenticeship program — has acquired DEV, one of the largest online communities for software developers. The acquisition is designed to connect MLH's experiential learning programs with DEV’s technical knowledge-sharing platform as AI reshapes how developers learn and build.

Move This World acquired by Riverside Insights / United States, Social-Emotional Learning 

Move This World provides K12 schools with short-form multimedia content designed to build students' social-emotional skills, supporting multi-tiered systems of support with universal instruction, targeted skill development, and coordination with clinical partners. Riverside Insights, which owns The DESSA assessment system — one of the most widely used SEL assessment tools in U.S. schools — will combine Move This World's instructional content with its measurement framework to create an integrated system linking assessment, instruction, and student support. 

Other

Replit raises $400M at $9 billion valuation / United States, AI Coding Platform / Georgian Partners (lead), G Squared, Prysm Capital, Coatue, Andreessen Horowitz, Craft Ventures, Y Combinator, Accenture Ventures, Okta Ventures, Databricks Ventures 

Replit provides a cloud-based coding environment built around AI-assisted development. Started by one of the founders of Codecademy, the platform got its start as a browser-based integrated development environment (IDE) designed to appeal to learners and educators. It has since evolved to serve a much broader market (including myself) outside of education, counting 40m+ users. Spurred by advances to its “vibecoding” products, the company’s valuation has also tripled in just the last 6 months, from $3B to $9B.

Oppenheimer's 2025 Global Learning & Education Annual Report 

Oppenheimer's annual EdTech market report finds global VC investment still well below historic levels (consistent with my own take). However, the team notes one important bright spot: Europe, which now accounts for over 30% of all edtech funding globally, the highest share on record and the only region to surpass pre-COVID levels. On the M&A side, the report describes 2025 as a transitional year, with Coursera's $2.5B merger with Udemy and Workday's $1.1B acquisition of AI-native platform Sana setting the tone. Oppenheimer expects consolidation and take-privates to accelerate in 2026.

What’s on your Whiteboard?

The Future of Online Education with 2U Chief Partnerships Officer Andy Morgan

EnGen’s acquisition of Cell-Ed and The Power of Multilingualism in Education with EnGen Founder and Chief Education Officer Katie Brown and Cell-Ed Founder Sonali Joshi

Insights on the Future of Hiring with NU Partners’ Co-founder Meredith Rosenberg

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

• Universal childcare officially becomes law in New Mexico.

• A $50M push to make childcare a top issue in the midterm elections.

• NYC aims to expand free childcare to include 2 year-olds.

• Childcare costs put college out of reach for Bay Area parents.

K12

• One of the strongest responses to the EdTech backlash narrative that has dominated this year – outcomes-based contracts. How districts are experimenting with outcomes-based contracting in EdTech.

  • Apropos of the EdTech backlash, What people want from our schools has never been accomplished, anywhere, ever.

  • That said, we should still try to create great school systems. To do that, we need to shift the discourse from what we are against to what we are for – we need a national AI strategy.

• Southern states boost early reading, but gains stall in middle school.

• How might private school attendance, and the broader trend towards school choice, affect NAEP scores?

• What’s cool in high school? Personal finance.

  • What’s cool in eighth grade? “Reclassifying”, or repeating, a year for a better shot at a college endorsement deal.

  • Also related to high school, if teens are comfortable confiding in AI, should schools embrace it for mental health care?

• AI slop is flooding children’s media. Parents should be very alarmed.

• State takeovers are having a moment.

Higher Ed / Workforce

• Harvard to tackle grade inflation with cap on A’s.

• More colleges are trimming BA programs to 3 years.

• To fix higher ed’s problems, start with Gen Ed.

  • Related, the remediation shortcut that made college harder.

• University net tuition continues downward trend.

• Surprising, bipartisan reforms are happening across higher ed.

• AI is exposing where learning was thin to begin with.

• Prediction markets companies betting big on marketing at college campuses.

Workforce

• An important note to those concerned that America cannot withstand the economic shock that’s coming: past history suggests that AI-driven productivity growth is more likely to increase consumption than it is to put us all out of work.

  • Today, job loss stories are everywhere, but it also seems like AI might be making workloads more intense more than it is forcing cuts. (Even Block, the newly-annointed poster child of AI-related job losses, had some non-AI nuance to their layoffs.)

  • Further, new jobs abound, you just need to know where to look. While the professional class is trying to wrangle ChatGPT to make our PowerPoints, the youths are making millions on Roblox.

• Coding after coders: the end of computer programming as we know it.

• How a manufacturing fix grew into Connecticut’s big bet on short-term credentials.

Looking for your next opportunity in education? Check out our W/A Jobs, which features 3,802 career opportunities from 316 organizations across the education industry. A few roles that we’re excited about from the past week:

• Clasp is hiring a Employer Implementation & Onboarding Manager to lead the successful launch of Clasp programs with their employer partners

• The College Board is hiring a Director of Psychometric Operations & Data Science in Puerto Rico to architect of the organization’s LATAM data ecosystem—ensuring that psychometric and operational data are managed ethically, governed responsibly, and leveraged to drive both operational excellence and strategic insight

• Seesaw is hiring a Manager of Revenue Operations to ensure that Seesaw’s Go-To-Market teams operate on reliable, scalable systems and processes that support the full customer lifecycle

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.