Here is the latest data about “the business of ed-tech” for May 2017

• Amount of venture capital invested: $212,180,000
• Number of investments: 13
• Average investment size: $17,681,667 / Median investment size: $5,100,000
• Number of acquisitions: 6

The funding total for 2017 remains higher than the two previous years at this stage. It’s higher, no doubt, because of the $500 million invested in SoFi in February. If you exclude that one investment – I don’t think you should, but some folks continue to insist that private loans aren’t “ed-tech” – then the total funding figure for the year-to-date is up from 2016 (by about $2 million) but down from 2015 (by about $100 million).

Although the amount of money flowing into ed-tech companies might make it appear the sector is still going strong, it’s worth noting: investment dollars are moving in bigger amounts to fewer companies. The number of investments is down from this time in both 2016 and 2015. The number of acquisitions is also down from previous years.

The companies that have raised the most money so far this year are:

• SoFi ($500,000,000 for student loans)
• EverFi ($190,000,000 for online skills training)
• Grammarly ($110,000,000 for grammar and spell-check)
• Xueba100.com ($100,000,000 for “homework help”)
• AltSchool ($40,000,000 for a private school chain / LMS)
• MasterClass ($35,000,000 for online classes taught by celebrities)
• College Ave ($30,000,000 for student loans)
• BYJU’s ($30,000,000 for test prep)
• MakeBlock ($30,000,000 for robotics)
• CreativeLive ($25,000,000 for online skills training)

Three of these companies are new to this “Top 10” list this month: Grammarly, AltSchool, and CreativeLive.

The top four companies on that list account for about 64% of the money raised so far this year. (And again, if you exclude SoFi, the investments in EverFi, Grammarly, and Xueba100.com constitute about 44% of the money raised so far this year.)

As always the data for this project is freely available on GitHub.