The EdSheet Vol. 33

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! 

Happy almost-Memorial Day to those in the US (and happy post-Victoria Day for those in Canada). One last round-up before you close your inbox for the long weekend. 

In this issue we cover:

• Anthropic + Gates form $200M partnership: A 4-year partnership pairs Claude credits and Anthropic staff with Gates grant dollars across global health, life sciences, education, and economic mobility, with tutoring and foundational literacy/numeracy explicitly mentioned in the announcement.

• Multiverse joins the EdTech-to-AI club: the company raised $70M at a $2.1B valuation to reposition itself from apprenticeships platform to Europe's "AI adoption platform" for enterprises — the second EdTech unicorn to refocus around AI over the past 12 months.

• Instructure pays the ransom: Continued fallout from the largest EdTech data breach on record.

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

Multiverse raises $70M at $2.1B valuation / United Kingdom, Workforce AI Training / Schroders Capital (lead), General Catalyst, Lightspeed, D1 Capital Partners, Index Ventures, Bond, StepStone Group

With this round, Multiverse joins Handshake as an EdTech unicorn pivoting towards AI. In Multiverse’s case, this pivot will move the company from training apprentices to training European enterprises on how to adopt AI. By all accounts, the pivot is working – revenue is up 50% YoY and this rounds’ $2.1B valuation is a $400M step up from their 2022 Series D funding round.

upGrad raises Rs 360 crore (~$42M) internal round / India, OPM / Ronnie Screwvala (lead), Temasek

The Indian OPM raised this round to finance their acquisition of Unacademy, with founder Ronnie Screwvala leading alongside Temasek and existing backers. Proceeds will also go towards the continued buildout of AI-native learning and workforce-training products.

Gyver raises €1.4M pre-seed / Italy, Skilled Trades Workforce / Brighteye (lead), Vento Ventures, Zanichelli Venture, Antler, āltitude

Gyver runs a WhatsApp-native hiring platform for electricians. The company says it's already onboarded 25,000 electricians and customers including Schneider, Amazon, and Boffetti to help re-build Europe’s aging tradesperson labor pool. The round will fund expansion from Italy across the EU.

New Venture Funds

Kalos Ventures closes $78.8M Fund I / United States, Workforce, Care, Education

Founded by Ashley Bittner, Kalos Ventures will focus on investing in early-stage companies across workforce, care, and education. Early portfolio bets include SMB-focused and AI-enabled learning platform Manifest and aging-in-place tech company Rosarium Health. Kalos’ close announcement continues a strong recent run of new capital for the education and workforce industries.

M&A

Presence acquires Education Modified / United States, Special Education

PreK–12 teletherapy and evaluations provider Presence is acquiring Education Modified, a digital platform aimed at IEP and special education workflow management. The deal supports the expansion of Presence’s digital platform beyond core clinician services into the documentation and case-management layer that surrounds them, deepening its position with the 10,000+ schools it already serves across 47 states.

Sanoma acquires Vicens Vives for €40M / Finland / Spain, K12 Learning Content

Finnish K12 publisher Sanoma is acquiring Vicens Vives, a secondary-education content provider in Spain, for 6.8X EBITDA. The deal adds €29M in topline revenue to Sanoma as well as an expanded presence in Spain.

Learnster acquires Learnify Tools / Sweden, Corporate Learning

Corporate LMS provider Learnster is adding Learnify Tools to its product suite, and announced their desire to add more products via M&A. Learnify Tools provides Learnster with compliance and digital literacy training offerings for the banking, finance, and insurance industries. The combined entity will now reach 600K+ users. 

Philanthropy

Anthropic and Gates Foundation launch 4-year, $200M AI partnership / United States, AI for Global Development

Anthropic’s commitment comes in the form of Claude credits and staff support while the Gates Foundation will provide grant funding, program design and expertise. The initiative spans global health, life sciences, education, and economic mobility, with evidence-based tutoring, career guidance, and foundational literacy/numeracy called out specifically.

Bezos family commits $100M+ to Robin Hood for NYC early childhood / United States, Early Childhood Philanthropy

The donation is earmarked for early childhood initiatives, but anchors a $1B general endowment campaign from Robin Hood, 70% of which is now raised. Of note, it sounds like there is unresolved tension over whether/how Bezos’ donation and Robin Hood’s activities will work with NYC Zohran Mamdani’s ongoing efforts to provide free childcare to NYC residents.

Ken Hao and Kathy Chiao commit $100M to UCSF / United States, Academic Medicine

Silver Lake chairman Ken Hao and his wife Kathy Chiao are giving $100M to UCSF to fund AI, hospital infrastructure and research collaboration initiatives. This donation adds to a string of AI-related 9-figure donations to universities, a trend we talked about just last week.

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

• The fastest litmus test of a parent’s perspective on AI? Ask them what they think of AI-enabled kids’ toys.

K-12

• First up, food. Ideally, real food. You may or may not agree with every detail of the new food pyramid, but its emphasis on real ingredients over processed ones stands out. And now, the MAHA movement is coming to school cafeterias. 

  • Related, USDA clears path for whole milk, 2% milk in schools nationwide. Flavored milks, with ~double the added sugars of their full-fat and limited-fat cousins, remain on the menu.

• Next up, infrastructure. American schools are falling $90B short on school facilities spending per year and it is starting to show. As important as the academic and philosophical debates around school choice are, I suspect we underestimate how much of parents’ decision-making comes down to wanting to send their child to a well-maintained facility with an engaged teacher – which the public school system is not providing consistently, in many areas.

  • Apropos of stressed out public school budgets, rising diesel prices are pushing schools to plan for cut or reduced bus service next year. 

  • While the number of school-age children drops.

  • And an increasing percentage of those children remaining in the public system require additional services. NYC is now spending $1B+ per year on special education lawsuits and settlements.

• All that said, innovation is not dead in the public system. Indiana is pushing to reinvent high school, offering students the opportunity to build Corvettes and care for cattle as part of their high school studies. One non-profit, rootED Alliance, is helping high school students in the southeast go to college and avoid dead-end jobs, one high school counselor at a time.

  • Some even argue the average american K12 student is doing fine.

• Finally, screentime. Lots of counter-narrative after an NBER study published in early May showed inconclusive academic results from phone bans. Including:

  • Parents are increasingly advocating to remove tech from classrooms altogether.

  • Schools are cutting back on the platforms they spent billions on, with i-Ready emerging as a scapegoat of the moment.

  • Professor Emily Oster argues that while phone bans may have had minimal academic impact, it's still demoralizing to teach a classroom of scrolling students.

  • And, a study of one Florida district showed phone bans led to improved both learning and attendance

Higher Ed

• It is graduation season, and the grads are…not particularly happy. They booed former Google CEO Eric Schmidt for his AI evangelism. They are attempting to cancel NYU professor Jonathan Haidt for his anti-AI evangelism. They are wrestling, profoundly, with what it means to be an ambitious young person in the age of AI.

  • The problem? They are searching for AI-proof degrees and careers rather than just getting to work.

  • Which is to say, there is a new premium on students with work experience. The more the better. Even elite institutions are recognizing this – MIT recently announced a new committee focused on introducing a co-op program to the university.   

• On the other hand, maybe grads just need to put down their phones. At NYU, the president is encouraging more in-person interactions in the spirit of fostering “collective effervescence.”

  • Slightly less poetically, at Harvard the hot new trend on campus is being punched in the face.

• It is also matriculation season for Fall 2026 enrollments. This season feels particularly fraught in the graduate degree space, where OBBBA’s loan caps are now in place. What many fear is that the caps will push students to take on riskier private loans to fill funding gaps.

  • Or, increased rigor around borrowing might cause universities to lower prices and purge programs that don’t pay off. UC Irvine recently lowered the price of its MBA program to $99,000, going so far as to put out a press release explicitly highlighting that tuition is “now priced below the federal loan cap.”

  • In other MBA industry news, there is a fire sale on M.B.A.s.

• Two weeks ago I wrote about some of the emergent quirks of a decade-plus of investment in college completion at US universities. It was nice to see a more detailed retrospective published shortly thereafter.

• And, of course, this roundup would not be complete without a mention of Instructure, who suffered the largest EdTech data breach I’ve ever heard of and, subsequently, acquiesced to the hackers’ ransom demands.

Workforce

• Jevons Paradox states that when a process or technology becomes more efficient, usage tends to expand rather than contract. It was first proposed in 1865, around the time the steam engine took off. Some are now using it as a framework to predict AI will drive a net increase employment.

• It is true that a number of high-profile tech companies – including Square, Cloudflare, and Coinbase – have used AI as the rationale for layoffs this year. But it seems even more notable that the CEO of DeepMind, one of the companies creating the models all those other companies use, thinks AI job cuts are dumb. 

• Which is not to say that some jobs and workers won’t be impacted in the transition to AI-enabled work, just that we — the education industry — are going to have to work harder, and more nimbly, to keep up with workforce demands.

Other

• Two trends to note that are technically adjacent to education, but will have large ripple effects on the education world. 

• First, investment firms are scaling up their lobbying efforts – A16Z is the top spender of this year’s midterm cycle, with $115M already deployed.

  • This tactic is not limited to federal lobbying. OpenAI is also spending big on policy, but at the state level rather than in DC.

• Second, with the IPOs of SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI approaching, hundreds of billions of dollars are about to become liquid. At least some of this money will then be deployed philanthropically, potentially creating a third wave of philanthropy.

  • Which raises the question, why don't philanthropists build anymore?

Data

• Reach Capital’s The State of Early-Stage Fundraising in 2026

• Phil Hill’s Spring 2026 Higher Ed LMS Market Analysis

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:

• Floreo is hiring a Sales Director to generate new revenue and expand

  existing customer relationships across K12 school districts, charter and private schools, vocational and adult residencies, and state education agencies

• Renaissance is hiring a Business Intelligence Analyst to focus on analytics engineering, AI enablement, and reporting across multiple business areas

• GoGuardian is hiring a New Business Executive to be responsible for the full sales life-cycle of Midmarket/Enterprise accounts within Texas and Oklahoma

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.