Hi,
We hope you are all well ☀️!
Our Festival summer at Brighteye is all about preparing 🐝 for our very own Edtech Startup Festival – happening next week, on 3-5 September. As always, we will be hosting hands-on online sessions in operational fields like People, Marketing and more. New this year is that we are dedicating Day 1️⃣ to some updates on Brighteye’s thesis and diving into a couple of areas where we are currently exploring opportunities. More details 🔎 below, and here.
Our other Brighteye August news includes:
Investment Updates – €3M in new portco Adam
Insights – H1: What got Funded in Edtech
Events – see you at TechBBQ in Copenhagen?
We hope you will enjoy the read - and please feel free to share with friends and colleagues that may be interested, too!
Best,🏄🏾♂️
The Brighteye Team
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💰 INVESTMENT UPDATES
🆕 Adam €3M – Late Seed
We’re excited to share that we just backed Adam, a Czech 🇨🇿 managed marketplace enabling blue-collar professionals in painting and masonry to easily connect with clients, improve productivity, and upskill to more value added services while improving clients’ experience, with €3M in late-Seed funding. Welcome to the portfolio family, Jakub Dvořák, Roman Sysel and team.
From an Edtech perspective, our Founding Partner Ben Wirz, said: "While providing their clients with a hassle-free experience, Adam also facilitates continuous training and professional development for the craftsmen, empowering these professionals to expand their services and improve their competitiveness. This not only benefits the craftsmen but also ensures customers receive high-quality services.”
After a successful expansion to 11 European countries 🇪🇺, Adam now plans to extend their services beyond Europe and into more construction trades.
Previous investors include Presto Ventures, and Markus Villig, Founder and CEO of Bolt.
🔁 Sdui - €21M
It is with great joy we keep backing Sdui 🇩🇪 as they raise an additional €21m and acquire FoxEducation! 🤝
Our Founding Partner, Alex Latsis, commented "We are delighted to continue backing Daniel Zacharias and the whole Sdui team as they build Europe's leading operating system for schools and daycare centres, now supporting the ops of more than 22,000 institutions!"
We are excited to work alongside some fantastic investors, including Summiteer, HV Capital, Haniel, HTGF | High-Tech Gründerfonds, and Michael Hinderer.
🎧 You can hear Daniel on the Startup Insider podcast – on funding and acquisition
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🔎 INSIGHTS
💶 H1: What got Funded in Edtech?
Earlier this month we did a keyword analysis of Edtech deals in H1 2024 and pulled the themes into a 📝 blog. What are they, you ask?
🧠 Unsurprisingly, AI and ML maintain significant investor interest
🧑⚕️ Healthtech x Edtech crossovers deepen
⚙️ Continued innovation in collaboration and admin solutions
🤹 Skills development and training covers broadening industries
💡 The State of (general) VC in H1
Looking beyond Edtech, we also published a blog post on the general State of VC and what it means for Founders’ raising experiences. We explored this using insights from PitchBook, Silicon Valley Bank, CB Insights...👀
We cover:
1. Runway lengths
2. Projected Series A activity and valuations
3. Outlook for companies raising down rounds
4. Revenue growth
5. Evolving investor groups
... and more!
🛫 A new Anonymous Exits chat is live
Pt. 04 in our Anonymous Exit series has landed! This time we talked to the founder of a company that went PUBLIC… ⛰️
The themes are:
- One leadership style does not fit all - find your own!
- Being a great entrepreneur doesn’t automatically mean being a great CEO
We heard about the highs and lows of the Founder's experience, as well as the evolving relationships you can expect as a founder CEO as more investors join your cap table and you become a larger organisation!
Please click on the image ⬇️ for the full story!
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🎪 EVENTS
🎒 The Edtech Startup Festival Returns
We are very excited to bring back the Brighteye Edtech Startup Festival for the third time next week. Join us for the 7 online Sessions on Tuesday 3, Wednesday 4 and Thursday 5 September. You’ll find the details here, in short we are doing:
Day 1️⃣
Pre-Session: Brighteye’s Thesis – The Evolution of Edtech
Session 1: Exploring the Thesis - Green Skills Opportunities in Edtech
Session 2: Exploring the Thesis - AI in Schools, the Workplace and at Home
Day 2️⃣
Session 1: People - Hiring for International Expansion
Session 2: Marketing & Growth - How Duolingo grew from 3m to 200m users!
Day 3️⃣
Session 1: Funding - Is your Edtech Startup ready for Funding?
Session 2: Customer Success - Landing & expanding - Selling to New vs Existing customers
Please register for your favourite Session(s) here
🍏 Nordic Edtech Summit
This week we have enjoyed great conversations and content at Nordic Edtech Summit, in the northern Swedish city of Skellefteå. Thanks Jonathan Viner for getting 100+ Edtech Founders, investors and the wider community together for a couple of days of sharing knowledge and experience. We’ll be back!
🥓 Tech BBQ
We’re heading back north in a couple of weeks, when team Brighteye’s Izzy, Ghita and Hege are in Copenhagen 🇩🇰 for TechBBQ on 10-12 September. We partnered with our friends at Redstone VC to host a Garden Session on Wednesday 11 September, where we’ll be in conversation with Edtech Founders Magnus Liungmann at Brighteye portco PeakPath and Christian Rebernik of Redstone VC portco Tomorrow University.
We’d love to see you there, please let us know if you want to meet!!
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