The EdSheet Vol. 35

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!

Straight to the news this week, here are the headline stories:

• Stepful raises $55M: The healthcare workforce training platform now counts over 32,000 program graduates and 35+ hospital systems in its orbit.

• 2025 NAEP scores are in: Younger students showed progress, but a widening gap for middle and high schoolers and girls' scores falling faster than boys' means open questions remain for how to improve academic outcomes.

• Big Tech bets on the trades: Meta and Google committed $165M to training skilled trades workers — a signal that talent is a significant bottleneck to delivering the hundreds of billions of dollars of AI-related infrastructure the companies have committed to building.

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

Stepful raises $55M Series C / United States, Healthcare Workforce Training / Oak HC/FT (lead), Foresite Capital, Hearst Ventures, Citi Impact Fund, SemperVirens, Y Combinator, Intermountain Health, ECMC Education Impact Fund

Stepful provides an employer-sponsored, debt-free healthcare training platform that places graduates directly into partner health systems through a vertically integrated model that combines instruction, simulation, assessment, and placement. The company has graduated more than 32,000 healthcare workers and serves 35+ hospital systems. The new capital will fund expansion into advanced degree programs in nursing, respiratory therapy, and imaging.

Orbio raises $21M Series A / Spain, Talent Management / Dawn Capital (lead), Visionaries, 2100 Ventures

Orbio leverages AI agents to manage the full hiring and onboarding lifecycle for frontline workers — including interviewing candidates, monitoring output, and running daily check-ins. The company has grown quickly since being founded last year, counting YUM! Brands (KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut) and the Stepping Stones Group among its clients. The funding from this round will be used to support hiring and continued product development.

Rocapine raises $13M Series A / France, Consumer Wellness Apps / Educapital (lead), Daphni, Ring Capital, Centre Court Capital

This funding round represents a potential step change in the way AI-native businesses are funded and grow. Rather than building one product in one market over time, Rocapine is focused on launching many products at a market as quickly as possible. In this case, the market is wellness and the company has already launched apps for habit-building and reducing compulsive behavior. The company reports that it hit $6M ARR in nine months on 2.5 million downloads, with one app reaching $1M ARR 16 days after launch. It is possible that Rocapine will revert to company-building norms if one app outperforms all the others, but this funding round is a specific test of the opposite – the capital will be put towards scaling the studio's testing engine to 400+ apps this year.

SkillMaker raises $4.5M seed / United States, Skilled Trades Workforce Training / Potencia Ventures, Full Circle, IDEA Fund Partners, Workshop Ventures, NC State Wolfpack Investor Network

SkillMaker leverages extended reality (XR) to compress the time required to train learners for skilled trades work, largely through automated knowledge collection and immersive simulations. Its first commercial deployment is training auto technicians in partnership with NAPA Auto Care. The company plans to use the capital to grow the team and expand its simulation offerings into data centers, telecommunications, HVAC, and plumbing.

Campground raises $2.2M / United States, Social Impact Program Operations Software / Precursor Ventures (lead), Acumen Americas, Underdog Labs, Access Georgia Foundation

Campground is a purpose-built operations platform for workforce development agencies, nonprofit human services organizations, and community-based programs. The company currently serves 200,000+ beneficiaries across 36 partner organizations and claims $20M+ in technology cost savings for clients. The new capital will fund expanded AI capabilities for outcome measurement and fundraising support.

M&A

Banyan Software acquires Educational Vistas / United States, K12 Administrative & Assessment Software

Banyan Software, a buy-and-hold software acquirer with 100+ portfolio companies, acquired Educational Vistas, a 30-year-old provider of K-12 administrative and assessment management software serving approximately 1,000 education organizations in New York. The company will continue to be led by the family who founded it.

EducationDynamics acquires Net Natives / United States / United Kingdom, Higher Education Enrollment Marketing

EducationDynamics, a higher ed marketing and enrollment management firm, acquired UK-based Net Natives, an enrollment marketing agency whose platform helps universities optimize their student recruitment funnel. The combined organization will serve 400+ institutional clients across 50 countries, pairing Education Dynamic's strategic depth in the US with Net Natives' global reach.

Eduviva Group acquires Møbel-Gruppen / Sweden / Denmark, Educational Products & Furniture

Eduviva Group's subsidiary Lekolar, the Nordic market leader in creative and educational products, acquired Møbel-Gruppen, a leading Danish school and office furniture provider headquartered in Holbæk. The deal extends Lekolar's reach in the Danish market and broadens its product range for schools and educational institutions. Eduviva Group is backed by private equity firm Nalka Invest and has been on an active acquisition run across the Nordic educational products space.

1EdTech restructures and acquires Learn & Work Ecosystem Library / United States, EdTech Standards & Interoperability

1EdTech — the nonprofit standards body behind LTI, OneRoster, Open Badges, and QTI — has split into two entities: 1EdTech Consortium, which continues its member-led standards work, and 1EdTech Global, a new 501(c)(3) to facilitate mission-driven partnerships for the public-infrastructure work that the organization’s membership model was not equipped to sustain. As its first major move under the new structure, 1EdTech Global is acquiring the Learn & Work Ecosystem Library, a community-maintained reference resource with 2,255+ curated entries on LERs, digital credentials, and workforce innovation.

What’s on your Whiteboard?

A conversation with Risepoint CEO Fernando Bleichmar on the evolution of online education, the importance of regional universities and local communities, and the impact of AI on student engagement.

In the first 18 months of the second Trump Administration, we’ve seen significant shifts in policy and political rhetoric surrounding the education market. How has that rhetoric translated into public policy, funding changes, and market shifts?

From efforts to reshape the role of the Department of Education to demographic and funding shifts transforming higher education, both the K-12 and postsecondary markets are navigating a period of rapid and consequential change. On June 24, join experts from Oliver Wyman and Whiteboard Advisors for an in-depth discussion of what's happening now, what may come next, and what education investors, operators, and leaders should be watching — in the near term as we head to this fall’s midterms, over the medium term as the contours of the 2028 election season begin to take shape, and for the longer-term structural shifts that will define the decade.

News of Note

Early Childhood

• An emerging topic for the 2028 elections in the US: new subsidies for early childhood education. Earlier this month, the New York Times took on a topic we’ve discussed before: the American family is at a breaking point as the cost of childcare continues to rise faster than wages.  

• One of the reasons for this cost growth? The more we research early development, the more we realize that investing in it produces outsize impact on both individuals and society. At Norland University, nannies are now being trained as “brain architects,” and are collecting wages ~2X higher than other UK university graduates. 

• Leading a small but rising number of parents to “redshirt” their children before kindergarten.

K-12

• Top of mind this week are the release of 2025’s NAEP scores, which offered both bright spots and areas of concern.

• New NAEP scores, and summer slowdown of industry news, often lead me to re-engage with the question: What actually drives academic outcomes?

  • Is it smarter spending on EdTech?

  • Is it stronger strategic planning at the district level?

  • Or is it as simple as a human-first school leadership team and more sleep? 

• Baked into all of these questions and strategies is, of course, funding. This summer, the funding question at hand appears to be whether and how schools, districts, and states should participate in the federal tax credit program that was introduced via 2025’s OBBBA but whose details are currently being hashed out before January’s program launch.

  • Related, it is a tough time to be an education budget hawk.

• Not helping NAEP scores? Grade inflation, which lowers graduation rates, college attainment, and future income.

• Which makes mastery-based curricula look a lot more compelling.

• Unrelated to NAEP but definitely of note, Meta, Snap, TikTok, and Youtube will pay Breathitt County School District $27M to settle a suit alleging the platforms helped create a teen mental health crisis that drained school resources. 1,300 other districts have filed similar suits, with the total liability to the platforms estimated at $400B+.

Higher Ed

• Summer in higher ed is, usually, a retrospective on the spring enrollment season. How are students feeling about their college choices and what changes are colleges making to better compete with their peers?

• To start, enrollment is up. Largely driven by enrollment growth at community colleges.

• It is possible that new “AI degrees” and integrated stackable credentials are driving some of this growth, but dual enrollment seems like the more likely candidate. 

• Regardless, enrollment growth at community colleges means smart 4-year institutions are looking ahead to how they can work with these students when they graduate, including making it easier to transfer academic credits.

• That said, this fall’s enrollment numbers will be a far greater indicator of industry health, with the start of the demographic cliff and caps on federal student loans set to hit at the same time. 

• Which is to say, now is probably not the time to buy a rural college campus.

• But maybe a good time to build one?

• Not quite on the level of buying a rural college campus, but another inadvisable way folks are spending $80,000: high school prom. High school seniors committed to top-tier college athletic programs are spending their athletic name, image, and likeness (NIL) money on custom suits, vintage watches, and luxury car rentals for prom night.  

Workforce

• Big Tech is pouring investment into training initiatives for the skilled trades workers needed to keep up with the $700B in AI-related capital expenditures they’ve committed to the market – Meta committed $115M (and a job for every trainee) to launch America’s Workforce Academy and Google committed $50M to training 300K skilled trade workers. 

  • Related, Bloomberg Philanthropies is investing a further $90M to connect high school students with registered apprenticeships in electrical work, HVAC, plumbing, welding, carpentry, and auto tech.

• Meanwhile, Anthropic committed $200M to studying the economic impact of AI, with a specific emphasis on understanding potential job displacement.

Looking for your next opportunity in education? Check out our W/A Jobs, which features 3,745 career opportunities from 319 organizations across the education industry. A few roles that we’re excited about from the past week:

• Pearson Ventures is hiring an Advanced Specialist, Corporate Development to support the corporate development team’s venture investment pipeline

• Credlens is hiring a Designer to produce design work across the organization’s core design system, component library, and brand templates 

• Outschool is hiring a Director of Data to be responsible for both developing infrastructure, pipelines, and tools to power Outschool’s data needs

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.