The EdSheet Vol. 37

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! Hope you had a wonderful fourth of July and recharged for the second half of the year. Action-packed issue this week, with these topics as our headliners:

• The College Board gets into the venture game: The assessment giant's Mission Investment Fund led a round in rostering-infrastructure startup Ednition. Another sign of strategic repositioning happening amongst the assessment giants (see also: ETS's recent acquisition of ACT).

• KKR goes (further) back to school: Portfolio company Lighthouse Learning is acquiring Pathways School Gurgaon for ~$175M in one of the largest private transactions of the year — further emphasizing the value premium private equity firms are placing on private schools operators.

• RAISE US launches with $500M+ committed: Gina Raimondo's new AI-workforce nonprofit raised from big-name philanthropies and AI providers, with retraining and apprenticeship pilots already planned in four states.

With that, on to 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

EdVisorly raises $13.3M / US, HED Enrollment Technology / Breachway Capital (lead), U.S. News & World Report, Lumina Foundation, Strada Education Foundation, Motley Fool Ventures, Juvo Ventures, Zeal Capital Partners

EdVisorly's EddyAI platform automates transcript processing, transfer credit evaluation, and GPA recalculation for admissions teams at 100+ institutions, including UConn, Carnegie Mellon, and Cal Poly Pomona, with partners reporting up to 85% reductions in manual processing. The proceeds from this round will fund product development and expanded implementation teams.

Ossus raises $6M / US (Sweden), Library Software / Investors undisclosed

Ossus (YC W26) is building an operating system for libraries, combining cataloguing, circulation, acquisitions, and public discovery in one browser-based system, with AI copilots that draft records and metadata while leaving approvals to librarians. The company runs two products on the same software foundation: Ossus ILS for public libraries and Librar for schools.

DeweyLearn raises $5M / US, Assessment / SJF Ventures (lead), Catalysis Capital, Morningside, Owl Ventures

DeweyLearn analyzes video, audio, and written work to assess hands-on learning for customers across healthcare training, workforce development, and K-12 and adult education. CEO Luyen Chou is a longtime edtech operator, with former roles including Chief Learning Officer at 2U, Chief Product Officer at Trilogy Education, and SVP of Product Strategy at Pearson.

Sherpa raises $2.2M pre-seed / Germany, Workforce Management Software / Seedcamp, DN Capital, Activant Capital, Brighteye (co-leads)

Sherpa is building an operating system for managing external work, including contractors, freelancers, service providers, and AI agents. The pitch (and what makes this interesting as an “EdTech” company): as enterprises adopt AI agents alongside contingent workers, both will need the same onboarding, compliance, oversight, and maybe even upskilling infrastructure. Funds from this round will go toward development of the team’s go-to-market function and technical integrations.

Alfa AI raises $1.3M / UK, Recruiting Platform / Sake Bosch (lead), FirstDegree, Golden Egg Check, Black Green Capital

Alfa AI automates candidate sourcing and screening for hiring teams and staffing agencies. In its first year the platform has supported hundreds of hires for companies including Revolut and Google. The proceeds from this round will fund continued platform development and go-to-market growth.

Ednition raises strategic round (terms undisclosed) / US, K12 Software Infrastructure / College Board Mission Investment Fund (lead), Reach Capital, Array Education

Ednition's RosterStream platform lets EdTech vendors better manage district integration requirements - like class rostering, SSO, LMS, and extended data. Proceeds from this round will accelerate their Roster Intelligence product, which automates data mapping, validation, and district onboarding. Of particular note, the College Board led this round, the latest sign of strategic repositioning among assessment incumbents - see also ETS’s recent acquisition of ACT. 

M&A

Sanoma acquires Fluentbe / Finland / Poland, Language Learning

Finnish education group Sanoma acquired Fluentbe, a Polish online language-tutoring platform serving 40,000+ students with 600+ tutors. The deal provides Sanoma with additional scale in Poland's tutoring market.

Lighthouse Learning acquires Pathways School Gurgaon / India, K12 Schools

KKR-backed Lighthouse Learning — which manages 2000+ preschools and 60+ K-12 schools in 500 cities — is acquiring Pathways School Gurgaon, a 1,600-student IB school, for ~$175M at a reported ~13x EBITDA. Lighthouse is KKR's India-anchored school platform with a rapidly expanding footprint, now including Nepal, Bangladesh, the Maldives, and the Middle East. This deal deepens Lighthouse’s position in its core market. It also sits within a growing collection of private-school bets across Asia by KKR: the firm agreed to a $1.3B majority stake in Singapore-based XCL Education earlier this year and also backed Vietnam's EQuest Education through its global impact fund. Premium international-curriculum schools continue to be some of the highest-value assets in the global education market.

CyberNut acquires Neptune Navigate / US, K12 Cybersecurity Training

CyberNut, a phishing simulation and security awareness platform used by 400+ school districts, has acquired the Neptune Navigate’s digital citizenship curriculum. The deal pairs CyberNut's instructor-facing security training with an established student curriculum, positioning the company as a comprehensive partner for online safety training for K12 schools.

Buyouts

Achieve Partners invests in KickUp / US, Educator Professional Development

Achieve’s investment in KickUp caps a remarkably active first half for the firm — covered in our last issue alongside an interview with Managing Director Ryan Craig. KickUp offers a combined platform for professional learning, instructional coaching, and teacher evaluation to 300,000+ educators across 35+ states.

Five Arrows and Vista Equity Partners invest in StarRez / US, Student Housing Software

Five Arrows, the alternative assets arm of Rothschild & Co, is making a strategic investment in student housing software provider StarRez alongside Vista Equity Partners, which first invested in 2022 and has since backed four bolt-on acquisitions, including off-campus housing platform College Pads. StarRez serves 1,100+ higher ed institutions and 2,000+ property managers, supporting more than 4 million beds annually. 

Other

RAISE US launches with $500M+ committed / US, AI Workforce Nonprofit

Former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and former Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb recently launched RAISE US, a national nonprofit funding retraining, apprenticeship, and job-transition programs for workers displaced by AI, with more than $500 million secured toward a $1 billion target. Philanthropic commitments are headlined by names like Melinda French Gates, Laurene Powell Jobs, and Stephen Schwarzman while corporate anchors include Amazon, Anthropic, Microsoft, and the OpenAI Foundation. The organization has already planned initial state pilots in Arkansas, Connecticut, Maryland, and Utah. Raimondo will serve as CEO.

What’s on your Whiteboard? CEO Perspectives

News of Note

K12

• AI-for-teachers continues to be the highest-profile market in education investment. Last year we saw $85M in venture funding go to Magic School, SchoolAI, and Brisk and OpenAI launch ChatGPT for teachers. Earlier this year, we saw Google partner with ISTE to train 6M teachers on the use of AI. This week, Anthropic followed with the announcement of Claude for Teachers. 

  • Of particular note, Claude for Teachers will leverage the Learning Commons Knowledge Graph, one of the largest adoptions of this tool to date.

  • And, for a look at how AI adoption is working at the state level, see Maine.

• Meanwhile, the discourse on AI remains glum. It continues to be easier to find research evidence of cognitive surrender and student disengagement than positive outcomes. The Atlantic went so far as to declare “the end of reading.”

  •  However, none other than “EdTech Cassandra” Audrey Watters points out that The Atlantic has been declaring the end of reading since at least 1890 (not a typo). 

• Which doesn’t seem to be stopping folks flocking to the non-traditional schools teaching “life skills and AI.”

• Who, due to all the media attention, will likely end up having to spend the least on marketing to attract families, a rising source of concern for state and federal school choice programs.

• Apropos of school finances, new research on the “propulsive” growth of non-teaching school staff and whether school closures actually save money.

• And, the National Education Association, the US’ largest teachers’ union, has a new leader.

Higher Ed

• Workforce Pell is top of mind this month as the program formally kicked off on July 1. Unfortunately, few programs actually qualify for the funding at this point, a point I expect to hold true for the foreseeable future.

• Also top of mind: academic integrity. Last week a Brown economics professor blamed AI for the dramatic variance in scores between his take-home and in-class exams. (See also, my interview with Proctorio CEO Mike Olsen above.)

  • In Wisconsin, AI also sunk a college presidency.

• And, the debate over student loan caps continues. Due largely to a court order, the Education Department (ED) expanded the list of “professional” degree programs eligible for higher loan caps from 11 to 29. Some are still unhappy.

Workforce

• The AI jobs debate continues. This week, a group of 200 leading economists warned that AI may bring large-scale job losses and companies are turning to AI to manage large-scale job application rejection piles.

• Even so, AI-related job titles are surging and productivity is increasing.

• Gen Z, trying to read the tea leaves, is responding by embracing the trades and leaving college for hacker houses.

  • Please note: these jobs are, often, great, middle-class opportunities, but they are not the six-figure jobs that the mainstream media often makes them out to be.

• Another option for Gen Z? National service. A time-honored tradition with substantial new money behind it: one of the pilot initiatives from Gina Raimondo’s RAISE US (see “Other” above) is a service-year pathway program into healthcare and education careers in Maryland.

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:

• Coursera is hiring a Principal Product Manager, Mobile to shape the mobile experience for the platform's 197 million registered learners.

• Handshake is hiring a Relationship Manager, Strategic to manage its largest employer accounts, as the company integrates Uplimit, the AI-native learning platform it acquired in June, into a broader career-and-skills ecosystem.

• Newsela is hiring a remote Creative Director to lead brand and creative direction for the K-12 content platform used by nearly two million teachers.

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.