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!
Busy week this week, let’s get straight into it. Here are the headliners:
The big districts say no to AI: Two weeks after we discussed all the new, free AI tools being offered to schools from the large model providers, the nation's two largest school systems pushed back — New York City banned student AI use through 8th grade and Los Angeles adopted a moratorium of its own.
upGrad closes Unacademy acquisition at $206M: roughly 94% below Unacademy's peak valuation, another bleak comedown from EdTech’s COVID-era highs.
Election season’s workforce stories: trade unions are pushing back on the negative sentiment surrounding new datacenter builds and early-career job seekers continue to face a bleak employment market.
All this and more below, 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.
Funding
BOOKR Kids raises €6.1M / Hungary, Early Literacy / TCEE Fund IV (lead), Infinit Capital
BOOKR offers a library of animated, interactive children's books with native-speaker narration, word-level definitions, and comprehension exercises layered on top for reading and English-language instruction. The company reports $2.7M in revenue from 600,000 paying students across 3,000+ schools in 30+ countries. The round, which combines primary capital with a secondary purchase and the conversion of existing notes, will fund the creation of a secondary-school product (BOOKR Next), a phonics program, and a speaking-practice tool.
3C Coding School raises $3M / Egypt, Content Provider (Computer Science) / MRG Economic Group (lead)
3C teaches children and teenagers web and mobile development, data science, game design, and cybersecurity, and says it has reached 120,000+ students. This round will fund a push into Saudi Arabia and the continued development of a proprietary learning platform.
Nookly raises $2M / United States, Family Learning / 500 Global
Nookly generates personalized learning content for young children — stories, songs, visual schedules, and social-emotional lessons built around a specific child's interests and the goals a parent, teacher, or therapist sets for them (sharing, kindness, a new routine). The company is specifically focused on serving neurodivergent kids and this round will fund product development and go-to-market.
M&A
upGrad completes acquisition of Unacademy for $206M / India, Test Prep & Upskilling
The EdSheet covered this deal at announcement in March, but the final number is surprising even given the “less than $500M” valuation that was reported at the time – and a far cry from the company’s ~$3.4B peak valuation. Still, there seems to be enough of a business left for upGrad to continue investing in it. The company reports $42M in annual revenue, will retain CEO Gaurav Munjal, and is not doing (further) layoffs as part of the transaction.
McGraw Hill acquires Teachally / United States, K12 Curriculum
Teachally makes software that lets teachers generate, adapt, translate, and differentiate standards-aligned lesson materials. McGraw Hill will use the company’s technology to make its curriculum resources more adaptive and localized to international markets.
Lemnis acquires Wayfinder / United States, K12 Social-Emotional Learning
Wayfinder offers a social-emotional learning curriculum used by 1.5M students across nearly 5,000 schools. The organization will now be a division of Lemnis, the non-profit founded and funded via HMH’s acquisition of NWEA in 2023. This deal is Lemnis's third acquisition in eight months, after InsideTrack (February) and Mainstay (March), and its first in K12.
Blackboard acquires Cursive Technology / United States, Academic Integrity
Cursive takes a novel approach to the academic integrity space: rather than scoring finished essays for the probability that machines wrote them, it records the writing process itself — keystrokes, pace, revisions, time on task — and lets an instructor replay how a draft came together. The product currently runs as a browser extension across every major LMS and is in use at 100+ institutions and founder Joe Thibault will join Blackboard as VP of New Ventures. Notably, this is the first acquisition by post-bankruptcy Blackboard and the second academic-integrity company to find a strategic home this summer after GPTZero's sale to Superhuman.
Abwaab acquires Eduact / Jordan (Egypt), K12 Learning
Abwaab, the secondary-school learning platform that operates across six MENA markets, is buying Eduact, a company whose software lets independent tutors and small learning centers run video lessons, grading, and payments.
360training acquires eMedCert / United States, Healthcare Certification
eMedCert provides online ACLS, PALS, and BLS certification and recertification with continuing-medical-education credit attached, and has issued 150,000+ certifications to roughly 70,000 clinicians. It joins 360training, a PE-backed compliance-training roll-up that now spans 17+ brands and 21M certificates across healthcare, food safety, EHS, real estate, and financial services.
What’s on your Whiteboard?
SEI VP of Corporate Strategy Sowa Imoisili and I sit down to discuss the launch of the second cohort of their Signal Labs accelerator.
Robin Cowie, CEO of Skillmaker AI, sits down with me to discuss the company’s $4.5M fundraise and the cross-over from on-the-job training to workplace productivity tool.
News of Note
Early childhood
California and New Mexico continue to provide early feedback on the budding issue of larger-scale state-level support for early childcare. This week’s topic: public options for 4-year-olds in California are squeezing the margins of private providers as they contend with the higher costs of serving only infants and toddlers.
Meanwhile, on the federal level, what’s behind the Trump Administration’s push to reform Head Start?
K12
Two weeks ago we wrote that the theme of this year’s back-to-school season was free AI from the big tech providers. The two largest districts in the country have now declined these bequests: New York City banned student AI use through 8th grade and capped classroom screen time, and Los Angeles adopted a moratorium of its own.
Ideally, these restrictions would be paired with human-centric policies like prioritizing play in kindergarten.
Alas, most reek of something much closer to “Just say no to drugs.” Phone bans continue to abound.
Though, a few – notably, the American Psychological Association – are calling for nuance over outright bans.
Another issue with nuance, reflecting on public school enrollment declines and how they impact teachers and staffing. Often captured in the same proverbial bucket - “just pay the teachers” - but, in fact, distinct issues.
Though both may(?) end up being supported by the billions in Metabux that will flow to states from August’s settlement.
One place increasingly unlikely to see those dollars: high-dosage tutoring.
Which is not to say we should write off tutoring in its entirety, just that it should be calibrated to meet schools’ actual needs rather than one-size-fits-all.
Speaking of calibration and adjusting to the times, remember Finland? Their academic results have dropped precipitously since the 2000s. First they took Bloom’s taxonomy from us, now Finland – what’s next?
Apparently, caring about what your kid is learning. Asking your kid what they learned at school is now a habit on the decline in the US and around the world — though this change is not backed by research.
Related, caring and motivation are also important characteristics of healthy classrooms.
Higher ed
Choose your fighter: Academic integrity or AI-related job loss. As sympathetic as I am, generally, to any individual losing a job, I thought we were all in agreement that essay mills were bad.
For what it’s worth, I argued for bringing back Blue Books more than 3 years ago. It felt almost silly to write at the time, but is rapidly becoming a common practice at colleges.
Because no one wants a society of cheats (AI users).
Except Dartmouth, whose president is more clear-eyed about the situation. “It is our job to teach students how to do what AI can’t: decide which questions to ask, exercise sound judgment, navigate ethical complexity, reckon with uncertainty, and take responsibility for their decisions.”
My favorite back-to-school stories are the ones that highlight new ideas and differentiation in the higher ed world. At the top of this week’s list: How Jalen Brunson and the Pope are boosting Villanova’s profile amidst large-scale campus expansion.
On the more ideological side, a radically simple plan to fix higher education and the drumbeat for work-based learning continues to grow louder and louder.
Less intellectual but not irrelevant, some parents just want their kids to party.
And, private equity wants to invest in college sports, but some schools remain wary.
However, all is not rosy in higher ed. The Wall Street Journal profiled Syracuse University as the latest university to face an enrollment crisis.
Related, student housing investors are braced for even more of this, making clear bets on a world with fewer universities.
Workforce
The two workforce themes of this election season: blue-collar jobs and entry-level jobs.
On the blue-collar front, unions are pushing back against the water consumption and electricity cost arguments against datacenter builds in favor of the jobs they create. And, we continue to wrestle with the promise and limits of career and technical education.
Entry-level workers, current or aspirational, are being attacked from all angles.
On the one hand, it is very hard, globally, to get an entry-level white-collar job. Washington Monthly calls it an “internship apocalypse.”
On the other hand, even those that get jobs are being told they aren’t good at anything.
It is no wonder, then, that some are deserting the digital world for traditional crafts.
Apropos of nothing:
Looking for your next opportunity in education? Check out our W/A Jobs, which features 3,482 career opportunities from 328 organizations across the education industry. Hiring? For $250/month or $1,000/year, organizations can post an unlimited number of jobs with no per-job fees. A few roles that we’re excited about from the past week:
Modern Campus is hiring a VP of Sales ($170K–$220K, remote US) to lead the organization's North American sales team.
Instructure is hiring a Regional Vice President, Sales — Parchment ($142K–$205.8K, remote US) to lead a regional sales team for Parchment, the transcript and credential network Instructure bought for roughly $835M in early 2024.
Western Governors University is hiring a Senior Strategist, Future of Education and AI Innovation ($109.9K–$170.4K, Salt Lake City) — an in-house futurist seat at the 190,000-student online university.
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.
