The EdSheet Vol. 32

This newsletter covers the business side of the education industry - venture funding, M&A, other financial transactions, and related news. 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! 

Lots to cover in this edition, headlined by:

• K12 operations software remains a favorite among PE investors: Minga’s $65M round from Riverwood Capital follows closely on the heels of TPG’s $100M investment in Zum a few weeks ago, showing signs that there is funding available for education businesses with the right profiles. (The early-stage market remains quiet.) 

• The “AI Institute” university arms race continues: A $200M gift to USC for AI integration joins a lengthening list of nine-figure commitments to elite research universities.

• “What are schools for now?”: Schools, both K12 and Higher Ed, have long certified a mix of academic and social achievement in nice, uniform, and timely increments. This arrangement is being upset by AI, yes, but also by policy and emergent social structures – leading more people (including me) to question the central tenets of what a school is.

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. You can check out our Deals Database here:

The following transactions caught our eye over the past few weeks. If you have a deal to announce in this newsletter, please reach out.

Venture Funding

Minga raises $65M / Canada, K12 Student Engagement Platform / Riverwood Capital (lead)

Minga, which got its start in 2018 providing digital hall passes, offers a “student behavior and engagement platform” that includes digital student IDs, attendance, and communications products to schools. This round is the second-largest in the K12 space this year, second only to Zum’s $100M round announced a couple of weeks ago, signaling that there continues to be interest in K12 operational tools among growth and private equity investors even as the early-stage activity remains quieter.

StudentCrowd raises $9M / United Kingdom, Student Housing Data / YFM Equity Partners (lead), Mercia Ventures

StudentCrowd provides reviews and information on student housing properties in the UK, with 14M+ students and 30 of the UK’s largest purpose-built student accommodation operators (PBSA) active on the platform. The company will use the round to expand their university- and course-level product suite reviews and push into the broader European and US markets.

Blomma raises $5M / United States, AI Career Coaching / Felicis (lead)

Blomma is a $25/month consumer AI career coach built around structured goals and contextual inputs (calendars, performance reviews, resumes) rather than open-ended chat. The company is aiming their pitch squarely at the Gen Z and young millennial workforce that has lost informal office mentorship in the post-COVID era.

AITS raises $4M / India, K12 School Operator / Big Capital (Co-lead), Redbrook Fund (Co-lead)

AITS is the parent company of Rysen School, a 3-year-old brick-and-mortar network of K12 schools with 15 campuses and 10,000+ students in Rajasthan, India. The company will use this funding to invest in scaling their school network, hoping to reach 100,000 students within the next three years. AITS’ scale is already a dramatic departure from the typical path of private school networks, which tend to build slowly over long periods of time – or inorganically. Watching the company grow over the next 3-5 years provides a great litmus test of whether consumer preferences for educational institutions might be changing.

Teacher's Buddy raises $2.3M / New Zealand, K12 Teacher Productivity / Soul Capital (lead), Giant Leap

Teacher's Buddy helps teachers create differentiated lesson plans, assessments, reports, and personalized learning materials aligned to local curricula. The platform has reached 12,000+ teachers across 130 countries in its first 18 months, and the company is targeting 30,000 teachers and 200 school partners across New Zealand, Australia, and the UK over the next year. 

M&A

College Board acquires Campus Sonar / United States, Higher Ed Recruitment

The College Board is acquiring Campus Sonar, a university enrollment market intelligence and advisory firm, and folding it into a new advising service offering available to universities this fall. The deal extends The College Board further into institutional services as the assessment market faces turbulence driven by AI, new market entrants, and fluctuating preferences for college admissions test scores from both students and institutions.

UWorld acquires Surgent / United States, Accounting & Finance Education

UWorld is buying Surgent Accounting & Financial Education from KnowFully Learning Group, adding Surgent's continuing professional education library to UWorld's rapidly expanding professional examination prep platform. This is UWorld's third accounting acquisition since 2019, following Wiley Efficient Learning and Roger CPA Review, and helps the company beef up its product portfolio as Berlin-based rival Amboss continues to deploy the ~$250M war chest it raised last year.

Storypark and Xap merge / New Zealand / Australia, Early Childhood Software

Storypark, which was bought out by Potentia Capital in 2024, is buying Xap, a Sydney-based competitor that builds childcare operations management software. The combined company brings together Storypark's family engagement and learning documentation with Xap's enterprise back-office (waitlists, enrollments, billing) and will now reach almost 10,000 childcare centers in Australia and New Zealand.

TimelyCare acquires Alongside / United States, Mental Health

University-focused mental health care provider TimelyCare is acquiring Alongside, a virtual mental health provider that works with K12 schools. The deal helps extend TimelyCare’s product portfolio beyond reactive clinical care into earlier, lower-acuity engagement — an important diversification as mental health budgets at universities and schools continue to grow more sophisticated.

Intrax acquires StudyPoint / United States, K12 Tutoring & Test Prep

Intrax, a cultural exchange and study abroad operator, is acquiring StudyPoint, a tutoring, SAT/ACT, and college admissions provider that has served 50,000+ students since the late 1990s. The deal extends Intrax beyond international programming into the domestic college-prep funnel. The company does not explicitly call out a market trend connecting cultural exchange/gap years and college prep work, but it would not surprise me to see more written about this topic over the next ~12 months as major colleges continue to invest in satellite campuses.

Buyouts

Trustbridge Partners acquires Literati / United States, K12 Book Fairs

Shanghai-based growth equity firm Trustbridge Partners is taking a majority stake in Austin-based Literati, the children's book company that acquired Follett Book Fairs in 2022. Literati now reports $40M in annual revenue and serves 2.5M students as the second-largest book fair operator behind longtime market leader Scholastic.

Philanthropic

USC receives $200M to integrate AI across the university

Venture capitalist and longtime NVIDIA board member Mark Stevens gave USC $200M to embed AI across the university. USC will use the money to recruit AI faculty, build new infrastructure, and integrate AI across the curriculum in every school. The gift sits alongside similar large-scale, AI-related commitments at UT Austin, Oxford, and MIT (and, to a lesser degree, Carnegie Mellon and Vanderbilt) and reflects a growing standard for "AI institutes" at major research universities chasing donor capital and defending against newly fickle federal research funding.

Rockefeller Foundation launches $100M Good Jobs for America strategy / United States, Workforce

The Rockefeller Foundation committed $100M over five years to expand access to "good jobs" in growing sectors — including infrastructure, advanced manufacturing, and the care economy — through grants to workforce intermediaries, employer partnerships, and policy advocacy. The initiative is an explicit bet on bipartisan industrial-policy momentum and targets workers without four-year degrees, building on Rockefeller's earlier place-based workforce work.

What’s on your Whiteboard?

The evolving role of faculty in the modern university with NCFDD CEO Geoff Watson

The fourth annual Solutions Summit, co-hosted by Whiteboard Advisors and ISTE+ASCD, takes place Sunday, June 28 in Orlando, Florida, ahead of the co-located ISTELive and ASCD Annual Conference — bringing together education executives, product leaders, philanthropists, and entrepreneurs committed to driving meaningful innovation in teaching and learning. This year's programming will look at where AI in education is actually headed (with a keynote on reimagining human connection in the age of AI), feature candid conversations on product impact (including how to talk about evidence with education leaders and an evidence hackathon), and examine the market signals shaping the next era of EdTech — funding shifts, compliance pressures, outcomes-based contracting, and what's emerging beyond the U.S. market.

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

• Trump's top child care official advocates for a 'bonfire of regulations'. It is, in almost any context but especially in education, off-putting to hear a public official discuss “barbequ[ing] a lot of sacred cows.” However, it should also be noted that, as it stands, the childcare system is already buckling and state-level investment in childcare remains mixed. The answer is not a BBQ, but it is also not status quo.

K-12

• From Georgetown’s Edunomics lab: US K12 public education spending tops $1T.

• Leading many to wonder: Do states that spend more on education get better grades? Answer: sorta?

  • Related, Why New York City spends so much on its mediocre schools.

• Unfortunately, even with all this spending, more than two-thirds of U.S. schools say they're unable to afford the cost of free student lunch.

• Leading more districts, like Philadelphia, to (finally) start closing aging buildings.

• Meanwhile, the next wave of K12 school spending is not going to the classroom or the cafeteria, but rather into competing for enrollments. Can Student Influencers Help This District Rebuild Enrollment?

• All of which leads to the question posited by NewSchools CEO Frances Messano: What are schools for now?

• In other news, the WSJ takes YouTube to task for America’s falling test scores. My natural position is to say “technology is just a tool, neither poison nor antidote.” This position is made significantly more difficult by the AI companies that can’t stop emailing school administrators with their slop pitches.

  • Even so, I will point out that a recent school cellphone ban study found mixed results.

• Finally, a piece of non-tech legislation that we can all (hopefully) celebrate: Oklahoma enacts new law that doubles elementary recess time.

Higher Ed

• Much ado over the past couple of weeks about students “speedrunning” college degree programs in weeks instead of years. At its heart, this conversation centers on the same question we asked above, what are schools for now?

• For the past ~10 years, higher ed has focused on speeding up time-to-completion – questioning the number of credits needed for a BA and accrediting new mechanisms, like competency-based programs, to let students earn degrees quicker. This work was usually done with an eye towards supporting the underserved some-college-no-degree market.

• We’re now seeing extensions of the argument for faster degree pathways that sound logical but feel off. They raise the question: are these students actually learning anything? If I get a Bachelor’s in AI from Sal Khan, TED, and ETS, what does that mean?

• That question sounds almost pejorative, but I mean it earnestly. Traditional schools are struggling with this too. 84% of Harvard undergraduates earned an A- or A in their coursework in 2024-25, leading the school’s faculty to recommend a cap on A’s (but not A-’s). 

  • Harvard’s is a useful example here, but the problem extends far beyond it – high school grade inflation is hurting college preparation all over the US.

• Often lost in the conversation on time-to-completion is that a consequential portion of the wage premium enjoyed by degree holders is non-academic. According to Brown University economist (and Raj Chetty co-conspirator) John Friedman, the most important thing a student gets from attending an Ivy-plus institution is “the opportunity to learn how to succeed in an environment filled with the world’s most talented and ambitious people.”

  • Apropos of advantages given by elite universities (and consistent with a trend I highlighted in January), Yale University is considering San Francisco for satellite campus. 

Workforce

• Can someone please decide whether Gen Z’s job prospects are hopeless or not?

  • I kid, sort of. The Gen Z jobs narrative strikes me as very similar to the “millenial job hopping” story, which turned out to be false.

  • I am much more interested in the new job categories Gen Z (and Alpha) is creating.

  • Which is to say, you do not need to spend $50,000 to get your kid a job!

• Also worth watching is the trade school market, which does not have enough supply to meet demand and appears to be going through some unfortunate growing pains as it scales up.

• Inside the Collapse of Trump's Scandal-Plagued Labor Secretary. Yikes.

Looking for your next opportunity in education? Check out our W/A Jobs, which features 3,963 career opportunities from 317 organizations across the education industry. A few roles that we’re excited about from the past week:

• The Gates Foundation is hiring a Director of Education, K-12 in Seattle to shape strategy for the foundation's K-12 portfolio

• The College Board is hiring a Director, SAT Suite Community Strategy and Implementation to lead district and educator engagement around the SAT Suite

• Clever is hiring a Senior Product Designer, School Organization Dashboard to lead design for the organization’s core administrative dashboard

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.