read

Here is the latest data on “the business of ed-tech” for October 2017:

  • Amount of venture capital invested during the month: $454 million
  • Number of investments: 20
  • Average investment size: $22.7 million / Median investment size: $5.3 million
  • Number of acquisitions: 9
  • Number of mergers: 1
  • Number of IPOs: 2

Investment Trends


The amount of money invested so far this year remains higher than at the same time in 2016 and 2015. (Indeed, the amount invested so far this year has now surpassed the total raised in 2016.) But the number of investment deals has fallen. That means that the growth in ed-tech funding is being driven by a small number of very large investments. Six of the twenty investments this month were for $30 million or more.

Acquisitions are also down from previous years – only 71 so far this year compared to 93 this time last year and 84 the year before.

Two of the investments this month were in venture capital firms: a $185 million fundraise by Owl Ventures and a $53 million fundraise for the Educapital. If you exclude those, the list of the companies that have raised the most venture capital in 2017 has not changed since September.

One notable trend that I'll look at more in my upcoming review of the-year-in-ed-tech: the amount of money invested in and invested by Chinese companies. (This is something that undoubtedly makes tutoring and homework help startups among the best funded this year.)

Download the Data


The lists of all ed-tech investments, acquisitions, mergers, and IPOs since 2015 have been updated to reflect this month's changes.

I also have created separate GitHub repositories for all areas of funding that I monitor:

These sites include human- and machine-readable versions of this funding data. For more ed-tech data sets, visit Hack Education Data on GitHub.

If you see an error or omission, please file a GitHub issue. You’re welcome to fork or download the repositories too, of course.

Audrey Watters


Published

Who's Funding Education Technology?

A Hack Education Project

Back to Archives