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!
Lots of M&A, earnings season and news items to cover today, here are the headlines:
Training for purple collar careers: As AI reshapes knowledge work, investors are betting on institutions that train people for careers in sports, the arts, and luxury crafts.
Earnings Season: Coursera (-26%), Strategic Education (-21%), Grand Canyon (-19%) and Bright Horizons (-18%) slide while Duolingo jumped 26%.
School choice: Democrats who campaigned against vouchers and ESAs will now run programs serving nearly 2M students; startups who serve the school choice market continue to raise new venture dollars.
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
Bites raises $40M / Israel (US), Frontline Workforce Training / PeakSpan Capital (lead), Vertex Ventures, Horizon Capital, Rittenhouse Ventures, Lyra Ventures
Bites sends short (~90-second) training lessons to frontline workers over text in 150+ languages. Customers include Unilever, Coca-Cola, Shake Shack, Wynn and Compass Group, and the company reports 161% net revenue retention. The round brings total funding to $55M and will fund US expansion and product offerings in new verticals like banking and insurance.
Pathfinder raises $16M / US, Education Savings Accounts / Portage Ventures (lead), Reach Capital, Gradient
Pathfinder issues a payment card that families (in states with access to education savings accounts) use to pay for school and school-related activities, with each purchase checked against program rules in real time. Seven months after launch, the company says ~8% of Arizona’s ESA accounts use the card and 80% of its users split their spending across multiple vendors. The $16M combines a $12M Series A led by Portage with a $4M seed from earlier this year, and will fund expansion into six states in 2027.
Matiks raises $10M / India, Consumer Math Games / General Catalyst (lead), Ronnie Screwvala, Info Edge Ventures, Tanglin Venture Partners, Untitled Ventures
Matiks makes competitive math, logic and memory games and says it reached 2.2M monthly users in September. The round follows a $3.1M raise last fall and the announcement falls alongside the launch of the company’s paid subscription offering. Most users today are in India, but the user base is expanding globally and the company plans to localize for two of its fast-growing non-Indian markets, South Korea and Japan.
Thrive Therapies raises $7.7M / US, School-Based Therapy Services / LiveOak Ventures (lead), Activate Venture Partners, Charter School Growth Fund
Thrive places its own clinicians in schools to deliver evaluations, therapy and behavioral health services to students with disabilities, and handles Medicaid billing for these services for districts. This is one of the busier corners of the education world: virtual providers Parallel and Cartwheel have raised growth rounds in the past year, Scholar Education and Journify raised venture dollars to build software for evaluations and IEP paperwork, and mature teletherapy companies Point Quest and Presence have been active in the M&A market. However, most of this activity has focused on remote delivery of services. Thrive is betting that districts will still pay for clinicians in the building.
Mindmax raises $3.3M / UK, Test Prep / Concept Ventures (lead), Redrice Ventures, Daybreak Ventures, Lerer Hippeau
Mindmax offers a voice-and-visual tutor for professional certification exams and upskilling. The company is led by co-founders Ed Cooke and Daniel Zohar, who previously built language-learning app Memrise, which claims 35M+ users.
Intuitivo raises $1.6M / Portugal, Teacher Workflow Software / Caixa Capital, Impact Innovation Fund (3xP Global)
Lisbon-based Intuitivo automates teachers’ administrative work, including grading, lesson planning and parent communication. The funding from this round will go towards go-to-market expansion into Brazil.
VUSE XR raises ~$1.4M / Germany, Industrial Training Software / IACD (lead)
VUSE XR converts CAD models, engineering data, and other technical materials into mixed-reality training that runs in a browser, on a phone, or on a headset. The company’s customer base, which includes ZEISS, Witron, and Hologic, among others, is predominantly in the industrial and life sciences spaces. This round will fund additional content-generation tools, product engineering, and commercial expansion.
KaiPod Learning announces new investment / US, Microschool Infrastructure / Reach Capital, EO Ventures, Ulu Ventures
KaiPod helps teachers open and run their own microschools through two products: Catalyst, an accelerator for new school founders, and Newton, software for enrollment, billing and family communication. The company has supported the launch of 100+ schools, including 50 in the past year. Most school choice policy funds the demand side: ESA and voucher programs now serve nearly 2M US students, and the federal scholarship tax credit could add $26B a year by 2030. KaiPod is working on the supply side, turning teachers into founders by taking on much of the risk and operational complexity of opening a school.
FullBloom invests in Daybreak Health / US, School-Based Mental Health / FullBloom (strategic)
Daybreak provides teletherapy and on-site clinical services to K12 students and bills through insurance. American Securities-backed FullBloom will integrate Daybreak with CharacterStrong, the school mental health provider it acquired last year. With Thrive (above), that’s two deals built on the same premise: there is strong district demand for services they can’t staff in-house, and billing strategy can be a central unlock for their broader-scale adoption.
M&A
3 deals in one write-up to headline the M&A section:
UCFB joins BIMM University / United Kingdom, Specialist Degree Provider
TheLinkU acquires Sam Green University and AthleteCon / United States, College Athlete NIL Services
The University of Law acquires London College of Contemporary Arts / United Kingdom, Degree Provider
A trend I am watching closely is whether AI’s disruption of knowledge work will create a larger market for training in the arts, entertainment and luxury trades: what I’ve started calling “purple collar” work. College sports is the clearest example. What was once a means to a professional paycheck now provides a substantial paycheck itself, and TheLinkU’s purchase of Sam Green University and AthleteCon is a bet on a growing market for the financial, tax, and brand training that used to be reserved for pro athletes and other high-earning professions.
College football, college basketball, and European football have reached the scale and complexity where professional support staff make financial sense. That is UCFB’s market: it trains ~2,400 students in (European) football business, coaching, and sports media. Its new parent, BIMM University, is a “purple collar” roll-up in its own right, adding UCFB to a portfolio of specialist schools in music, film and performing arts.
The University of Law’s acquisition of the London College of Contemporary Arts extends the pattern beyond sports: a fairly traditional university focused on legal training is buying into the hospitality and creative industries.
What’s exciting about these deals, and the recently profile Heirloom Craft in San Francisco, is that they all suggest a new category of careers – from college sports event planner to Premier League set-piece coach to premium leatherworker – that were not considered as comparable to knowledge work even a decade ago and now pay well enough to justify high-end training.
Laureate acquires UCAL for ~$35M / Peru, Degree Provider
Laureate’s Peruvian university, UPC, bought Lima’s Universidad de Ciencias y Artes de América Latina (UCAL), which has ~2,500 students, and will fold it into UPC. About $25M of the price is for UCAL’s campus, which makes this as much a real estate deal as an enrollment one.
NIIT Learning Systems acquires Bluewater Learning for up to $17.6M / India (US), Corporate Learning
Plano-based Bluewater provides learning strategy, content and learning-technology services to 1,100+ corporate clients and is a partner of both Cornerstone and Docebo. The price includes earnouts over five years, and the deal adds US advisory work to NIIT’s managed training services business.
AdeptID acquires MedSource Travelers / United States, Healthcare Staffing
AdeptID, which built its business on talent-matching software for workforce programs, is buying MedSource, a travel nurse and allied health staffing firm, as the parent company focuses its strategy on healthcare staffing; MedSource is AdeptID’s second healthcare staffing acquisition in a year, after Lucid Staffing Solutions last October. It is the latest deal to blur the lines between software, training and degree providers, and employers in healthcare: hospital operator HCA bought the College of Healthcare Professions, Stepful bought a 45-year-old nursing school, Ascend Learning bought scheduling software M7 Health, and Risepoint picked up Keypath’s North American business for its clinical-placement capabilities.
Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) acquires Goalsetter / United States, Financial Education
Goalsetter sells a standards-aligned financial literacy curriculum for middle and high schools and MoneyLingo, a mobile course for college students and adults, and had raised ~$40M from investors including Edward Jones and MassMutual. Founder Tanya Van Court becomes HCZ’s Chief FinTech Officer, and will continue to operate the platform.
MentorcliQ acquires Neobrain / United States / France, Skills Intelligence Software
Neobrain, founded in Paris in 2018, sells skills mapping, career-pathing and internal talent marketplace software covering 1M+ employees in 80 countries. The Neobrain team will stay in Europe while joining Columbus-based MentorcliQ, a mentoring platform that reaches 6.5M+ employees.
Digital Science acquires Jenni AI / United Kingdom, Academic Writing Software
Jenni AI helps students and researchers draft papers, manage sources and check citations against the original material, and claims 8M+ users in 189 countries. Digital Science, whose academic research-oriented brands include Dimensions, Overleaf and Altmetric, will keep it as a standalone product and connect it to the organization’s database of 171M research publications. It is the latest student writing tool to find a strategic home this year, after GPTZero and Cursive.
Meteor Education acquires AET Labs / United States, CTE Equipment & Lab Design
Massachusetts-based AET Labs, founded in 2005, supplies engineering, automation, advanced manufacturing and automotive technology programs at high schools, vocational schools and colleges across New England. It is the second CTE acquisition for Bain Capital Double Impact-backed Meteor, after Advanced Technology Consultants in 2024, as it works toward building a national CTE platform.
Eagle Point Software acquires Global eTraining / US (Canada), AEC Workforce Training
Alberta-based Global eTraining sells online training and in-workflow job guidance to architecture, engineering, construction and manufacturing firms. Dubuque-based Eagle Point sells its Pinnacle Series platform (e-learning, skills assessments and workflow support) to the same industries, and says the larger consolidated platform will be better able to invest in the development of its learning products.
Academic Programs International (API) acquires The Intern Group / United States, Study Abroad & Internships
Austin-based API runs study-abroad programs in nearly 80 cities across 30 countries for 800+ member and affiliate institutions. The Intern Group has placed 15,000+ students in international internships since 2011 and becomes a new API Intern Group division led by its co-founder, David Lloyd. It’s a reminder that international education isn’t just about US universities admitting international students: as the businesses built on inbound students continue to face policy-driven headwinds, the number of US students studying abroad for credit rose 6% to ~298,000 in 2023-24.
Smoothwall acquires Securus Software / United Kingdom, Student Safety Software
Smoothwall, a school web filtering and monitoring provider that was itself acquired in 2021 for £75.5M, is buying Securus, which provides fully managed monitoring of student device activity for UK schools.
Other Transactions
Coding Giants secures up to ~$6.9M in venture debt / Poland, Kids’ Coding Education / Orbit Capital
Coding Giants has taught coding and math to 130,000+ children and teens across 13 markets in Europe and the Americas, and says it has ~$15M in ARR. Less than two years after an €8.5M equity round led by True Global Ventures, it is borrowing up to €6M from Orbit Capital to expand in the US, Mexico and Spain, including through acquisitions.
Funds and philanthropic commitments
Farmer Family Foundation commits up to $100M to Miami University / United States, Philanthropy
The foundation of the late Cintas founder Richard Farmer and his wife, Joyce, will give up to $100M over ten years to the business school that already carries their name, including $55M in the first three years and a $25M match for other donors; the remaining $45M depends on the school hitting performance metrics. It is the largest gift in Miami’s history and extends a run of nine- and ten-figure gifts to established universities.
Earnings
Note: Nov. 5’s broad market selloff (the Nasdaq fell 5.5%) coincided with some of the steepest drops below, including McGraw Hill, Grand Canyon, Perdoceo and Strategic Education.
Pearson: ~2 years into Omar Abbosh’s tenure as CEO, Pearson will reorganize into four business units (US K12, US Higher Ed, UK & International, Enterprise) in January. Shares closed up 0.8% the day it reported.
McGraw Hill: K12 revenue fell 9.6% as McGraw Hill won fewer of this year’s math adoptions than it expected, while higher ed held flat and digital revenue grew 2.6% on usage of its AI tools. Shares fell 12% on the day it reported.
Sanoma Learning: The Finnish publisher raised the floor of its 2026 profit guidance as efficiency measures lifted margins, but third-quarter results came in below analyst estimates. Shares fell 12% the day it reported, and another 6% the next day.
Stride: Three months into the job, new CEO Bob Knowling called the quarter “disappointing” after Stride’s first enrollment decline in years (-2.5%), and launched a strategic reassessment that halts initiatives without a clear path to value. Shares closed the next day down 3%. Also, two weeks after earnings, Bloomberg published an investigation of Stride’s virtual schools in Texas, alleging that the company’s schools had remarkably high truancy rates while collecting more than $1B in state money over five years.
Grand Canyon: GCE’s partner enrollment grew 5.2%, led by online (+7.1%) and its accelerated nursing sites (+12.6%), under an amended services agreement with GCU that now runs through 2041. Shares fell 19% the next day.
Perdoceo: is counting on recently acquired South University (~10,500 students, 11 campuses and graduate health programs) to restart growth as Colorado Technical University enrollment stalls. Shares fell 11% the day it reported.
Strategic Education: took a $134M impairment on Torrens University, citing Australia’s restrictive caps on international student enrollments, and warned more could follow. Shares fell 21% on the day it reported.
Laureate: grew new enrollment 8% and plans to speed up campus openings in Mexico and Peru through 2028 (see UCAL acquisition above), while adding $150M to its buyback. Shares fell 8% the next day.
Covista (formerly Adtalem): raised guidance on record Walden enrollment (+12.8%), but said hesitancy over federal loan caps slowed growth at its medical and veterinary schools. Shares fell 3% the next day.
Nelnet: launched FACTS Compass, software for scholarship-granting organizations under the new federal tax credit, as revenue from its federal loan servicing contract fell to $5.3M from $32.9M; it also recently bought India’s Entab. Shares rose 3% the next day.
Chegg: repaid its remaining convertible debt while managing a 40% drop in revenue and a reorganization to focus on its employability product. Shares were ~flat the next day, still below the NYSE’s $1 minimum and at risk of being delisted.
Coursera: says it will hit its Udemy synergy targets in eight months instead of 24 and is merging the two platforms under “Project Helix.” Weak fourth-quarter guidance led shares to drop 26% the next day.
Docebo: launched paid Knowledge and Agents modules and declared a ~$60M special dividend after a $70M tender offer received lackluster interest. Shares fell 5% the day it reported.
Duolingo: CEO Luis von Ahn said the company is prioritizing “teaching better and user growth” over monetization this year, and daily users grew 29% to 64.9M. Shares jumped 26% the next day.
Bright Horizons: began a strategic review of its Australian business after a $290M write-down and cut guidance as a UK regulatory safeguarding notice weighs on new enrollments. Shares fell 18% the next day.
PhysicsWallah: returned to profit as courses beyond its core JEE and NEET exams reached 74% of online enrollments. Shares closed the next day up ~4%.
Soon-to-be-public Imarticus Learning: which bought Singapore’s BELLS this summer, is preparing a confidential IPO filing in India.
News of Note
Early childhood
Prepare to hear a lot more about private equity’s role in early childhood education (ECE) as subsidies continue to look like wins across the US political spectrum and PE firms continue to consolidate the space (though mostly at premium price points).
Related, the UK’s iStep Learning filed for a US IPO of up to $18M to continue rolling up daycare operators in the UK, where it competes with other sponsor-backed groups like Kindred and Storal.
And in Australia, ASX-listed Nido is buying nine daycare centers from the collapsing Edge Early Learning group.
A new report shows California’s transitional kindergarten has had only a modest effect on subsidized child care so far, a counterpoint to the narrative about daycare operators being squeezed by lower TK enrollments.
Meanwhile, school districts with shrinking K12 enrollment are turning closed campuses into infant and toddler care.
Two longer-term supply problems: over half of licensed home-based providers are over 50, and 4% are under 30, and New Mexico’s $11B universal child care fund could be exhausted by 2048.
K12
The midterms didn’t settle school choice so much as hand parts of it to new management: Democrats will now run programs serving nearly 2M students that many of them campaigned against. Texas’s incoming comptroller has already promised an audit of the state’s newly established ESA program.
Another pressing question for the recently elected cohort is the federal tax credit scholarship program. 31 states have opted in, though five Democratic governors continue to press Treasury for guidance ahead of the Jan. 1 deadline.
Also of note, Pennsylvania became the 40th state to restrict phones as candidates in both parties continued to campaign on screen and AI limits, consistent with the current views of parents, 81% of whom want schools barred from buying unproven tech, though most still want AI taught, with guardrails.
The anti-tech narrative reigns, with the NYT taking Google to task for turning off search to schools who turn AI off.
And negative evidence for tech in classrooms is mounting: a randomized UK trial of AI math tutors found in-session gains but no test-score lift, one researcher’s two AI tutor studies pointed in opposite directions, and an audit of edtech meta-analyses found impossible statistics and fake references.
As if that were not enough, over half of districts also had a cyber incident last year.
Higher ed
The fall enrollment numbers are in: undergraduate growth slowed to 0.6% and master’s enrollment fell 3.7%. Dramatic drops in international student enrollment seem like the key story, both in the US and abroad.
Full-time MBA applications fell 27%, with international applications to graduate business programs down 38%, and the University of Washington and Minnesota’s colleges reported fewer international students.
In Australia, Assistant Minister for International Education Julian Hill estimated public universities will lose ~$1.3B this year from an 18% drop in new international students.
Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security proposed charging colleges a $70,000 fee before their first optional practical training (OPT) recommendation and $30,000 for each one after. OPT is one of the main draws for international students who want to work in the US after graduating, so the fee would give colleges one more reason to recruit fewer of them.
All of which is leading to a decidedly friendlier domestic admissions market, now including loan repayment assistance programs, a relatively niche tool usually reserved for law schools.
AI on campus: UNC dropped its AI essay-scoring tool because applicants’ own AI use made it meaningless and San Francisco Bay University handed lectures to faculty avatars.
Kalshi filed to list admission-rate contracts at 22 colleges, including all eight Ivies.
Meanwhile, 4 in 10 undergraduate students agree digital wagering is a problem, and 3 in 10 know a student who has experienced financial distress or academic fallout from online wagering losses.
Federal prosecutors made the first FAFSA ghost-student arrests, with fraud estimated at $200M+.
Workforce
DOL opened applications for nearly $200M in apprenticeship incentives while Big Tech is funding data-center technician certificates at community colleges, extending a trend we flagged last month.
And Arizona became the seventh state with an approved Workforce Pell program: a phlebotomy course at Pima Medical Institute.
For the professional class, job application volume has more than doubled in two years, and Gartner expects one in four candidates to use AI agents by 2029.
Looking for your next opportunity in education? Check out our W/A Jobs, which features 3,939 career opportunities from 327 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:
Campus is hiring a Director of Business Development & Partnerships in New York (hybrid) to build its partnerships function from scratch, sourcing and closing deals with workforce platforms, community organizations and employers that can send students to its accredited, two-year online college.
D2L is hiring a VP, Customer Support, Community, and Knowledge in Kitchener or Toronto to run support and community for the LMS provider’s global customer base.
ISTE is hiring a Director of Program Evaluation in Arlington, Virginia, to measure what the edtech association’s programs actually achieve, a timely mandate given this edition’s run of underwhelming edtech studies.
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.
