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!
EdTech Week starts tomorrow in NYC, and with it a busy stretch of travel. If you’ll be at any of the events below, I’d love to say hello.
EdTech Week (New York, Oct 13–15): I’m speaking on “The Skills Nobody Is Teaching: Rebuilding the Trades Pipeline” on Wednesday and “Alternative Capital for Education Companies: Inside the New Models” on Thursday.
Adobe EduMAX (Bay Area, Oct 27–29): I’m moderating a panel on how colleges can connect classroom learning to what employers need. You can request an invite here.
Whiteboard’s Post-Election Policy Summit (Washington, DC, Nov 12): A full day at Gallup’s headquarters covering what the prior week’s midterm results will mean for education policy. You can see the agenda and request an invite here.
Lots to cover in this edition. Here are the headlines from the past two weeks:
A good time to be a seller of workplace skills data: Pearson (Workera) and SAP (TechWolf) each bought a company whose core competency is measuring employee competencies. The latest example of large-scale strategic repositioning in the assessment space in the face of AI.
Corporate America commits to building talent pipelines: Amazon, Bank of America and Verizon committed more than $1.2B to community colleges, apprenticeships and other forms of training.
A record gift for Carnegie Mellon: Billionaire hedge fund manager Ken Griffin made the largest-ever single donation to a US university — $3B. The donation comes with naming rights to the university’s established school of computer science and will anchor a new Miami campus.
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.
Funding
Arivihan raises $10M / India, K12 Test Prep / Accel and Prosus Ventures (co-leads), GSF angels
Arivihan offers recorded video lessons, an on-demand “doubt-solving” agent, and study plans state board, CBSE and NEET exams in India. The company differentiates itself from other exam prep companies in India by targeting users in tier 3 cities and rural geographies, a demographic which now constitutes ~80% of subscribers. The funding from this round will be put towards continued expansion of this go-to-market strategy, a larger content catalog, and additional language localization.
Scholar Education raises $2M / United States, Special Education Software / OneSixOne Ventures (lead)
Scholar Education makes software to help students, parents, and teachers navigate the special education process, including a tool to deliver students’ accommodations and to handle teacher planning, grading and progress tracking. The funding will support product development, including a new line aimed at streamlining special education evaluations.
M&A
Pearson acquires Workera / United States, Workforce Skills Assessment
Venture-backed Workera offers role-specific skills assessments that use simulations and adaptive testing to measure employee competencies. Workera was Pearson’s second assessment acquisition in September, after ITS, and will fold into the company’s Enterprise Learning & Skills unit. Workera CEO Kian Katanforoosh will also join Pearson’s leadership team.
SAP acquires TechWolf / Belgium, Workforce Skills Assessment
TechWolf models employees’ skills based on existing work outputs to measure employee competencies. TechWolf’s goal is not dissimilar to Workera’s, though the means are quite different. Both acquisitions also fit into a broader theme – the strategic repositioning of the assessment market in the face of AI – that we’ve been following closely this year.
Carnegie Learning acquires Ethiqly / United States, K12 Writing Instruction
Ethiqly supports students through the brainstorming, drafting and revision components of the writing process, and shows teachers how each student’s writing develops over time. Carnegie Learning will pair Ethiqly’s software with in-house brand Lenses on Literature, a grades 6–12 literacy curriculum.
Scholastic acquires Cottage Door Press for ~$71M / United States, Early Childhood Publishing
Cottage Door publishes board books and novelty formats for young children and did ~$45M in net revenue in the twelve months through May, which puts the price at 1.6x revenue for a business Scholastic calls “strongly profitable.”
Finalsite acquires RevTrak / United States, K12 Payments
Finalsite, the Veritas Capital-backed website, communications and enrollment platform used by 40,000+ schools, is adding RevTrak, which 13,000+ schools use to collect payments for meals, athletics, fees and fundraising.
Nelnet Business Services acquires Entab / India, K12 School Management Software
Entab’s CampusCare platform runs admissions, fees, operations and parent communication for 1,000+ schools and 1.5M students across 28 Indian states. Nelnet’s school services division (~12,000 K12 schools and 1,200 colleges) framed the deal as the start of an international expansion strategy.
Funds and philanthropic commitments
Ken Griffin commits $3B to Carnegie Mellon / United States, Philanthropy
The largest single donation to a U.S. university comes in 2 parts: $2B will build a 35-acre Carnegie Mellon satellite campus in Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood for ~3,500 students, and ~$1B will go to Carnegie Mellon’s Pittsburgh campus, including the school of computer science which will now carry Griffin’s name. The donation extends a run of nine- and, now, ten-figure AI- and computer science-related donations to universities and the trend of elite, private institutions opening new campuses in global destinations.
Amazon commits $1B+ to data center communities / United States, Corporate Commitment
Among other initiatives that form the commitment, Amazon’s “Built Together” program will put $100M+ into community college endowments to cover out-of-pocket costs for an estimated 300,000 students who live in communities near data centers and another $100M into new trades training centers near its sites.
Bank of America commits $150M and 1,000 new apprentices / United States, Corporate Commitment
BofA will add 1,000 more apprentices over two years, on top of the 800+ it already hires annually, across consumer banking, technology and operations. It will also give $150M over five years to workforce training organizations.
Verizon commits $70M to AI skills training / United States, Corporate Commitment
The total is $50M in new money plus Verizon’s existing $20M Reskilling and Career Transition Fund. Learners will get free courses from IBM, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, Coursera and OpenAI. Of note, Goodwill (yes, you read that right, their training and career support division is quite large) is one of the key community partners providing services.
What’s on your Whiteboard?
A conversation with Rose Else-Mitchell, Executive Director of the Science of Reading Center at SUNY New Paltz, on a career that runs from teaching in Sydney to senior roles at Scholastic and HMH, research-based reading instruction, and where technology helps (and doesn’t) in teaching kids to read.
News of Note
Pre-K to 12
Only 32% of Americans are satisfied with K12 education, the lowest satisfaction score in 27 years, though parents still rate their own child’s school more favorably than the system as a whole.
Budgets keep tightening. Indiana superintendents say property tax reforms are forcing job cuts, two in five superintendents pulled money from other budget lines to cover school meals last year, and states are deciding how to spend their share of the Meta settlement.
Several states are weighing minimum recess requirements, part of a broader swing back toward unstructured play that early childhood experts say preschool should prioritize over early academic drills.
Teens’ views of cellphone bans softened over the school year, a shift from earlier this year, when teachers backed the bans and students did not.
Possibly related, middle schoolers have turned NPR’s podcast comment sections into a group chat.
Small, rural districts are recovering attendance faster than larger ones, a bright spot against the permanent shift in attendance norms elsewhere.
Parents are starting to worry about grade inflation.
AI in the classroom: a new study finds vendors are adding AI features faster than they can show learning gains, often without districts knowing; Google’s Gemini push into schools is drawing pushback from some teachers and families; and Common Sense Media rated ChatGPT for Teens an “unacceptable risk”, which OpenAI disputes.
Higher ed
This fall’s trending strategy is “retrenchment.” Minnesota State plans to shrink by merging colleges and closing or selling campuses, Syracuse is “questioning everything” after missing its enrollment goals, and small private colleges are cutting sticker prices by up to $20,000. Even Vanderbilt, whose satellite campus strategy I have lauded, placed its divinity school into receivership for financial stability reasons.
That said, schools continue to cast a wide net for novel recruitment strategies. Quite literally, a growing number of colleges are building competitive fishing teams.
AI on campus: California Community Colleges is asking the state for $195M to fund AI across its 116 colleges and Handshake launched a free GRE tutor, which the company says matches human tutors’ learning gains.
Workforce
Employers are rethinking junior hiring as AI absorbs entry-level tasks.
Healthcare employers’ needs continue to outgrow the licensing rules and training programs that supply them.
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:
College Board is hiring a remote Vice President, Assessment Design & Development ($231K–315K) to oversee how its assessments are designed and built.
Emeritus is hiring a Chief Financial Officer for the University of Colorado Denver’s planned Hyderabad campus. CU Denver recently received a letter of intent from India’s higher education regulator to become the first U.S. public university with a campus in India, with Emeritus as its joint venture partner and a first cohort expected in August 2027.
Instruction Partners is hiring a Senior Director, State Partnerships (~$144K, multiple states) to lead the K12 nonprofit’s work with state education agencies on instructional improvement.
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.
