Here is the latest data on “the business of education” for 2018:
- Amount of venture capital invested during the month: $627,500,000
- Number of investments: 17
- Average investment size: $39.2 million / Median investment size: $15 million
- Number of acquisitions: 8
- Number of mergers: 1
- Number of IPOs: 0
- Number added to the “ed-tech dead pool”: 1
Investment Trends
As you can see by the list below of the companies that have raised the most money, “tutoring” remains one of the most popular pits for venture capitalists to throw their money into. Tutoring often works to expand existing education inequalities, so that’s always fund to consider the ways in which ed-tech and venture capital continue to make the world worse.
Coding bootcamps were again a popular investment this month – part of a larger narrative that key education VCs are pushing about a more efficient, more skills-oriented higher ed marketplace. (Of course, coding bootcamps and other “alternatives” litter this year’s ed-tech deadpool too. Good times.)
The Biggest Investments of 2018 (So Far)
The companies that have raised the most money in 2018:
- VIPKID (tutoring): $500 million
- Zuoyebang (tutoring): $350 million
- 17zouye (tutoring): $200 million
- Zhangmen (tutoring): $120 million
- Connexeo (school administration software): $110 million
- DadaABC (English language learning): $100 million
- Knowbox (tutoring): $100 million
Download the Data
As part of this project, you can review information from the last few years who’s received funding, who’s been acquired, who’s IPO’d, which startups have closed, and who’s investing in the stories that Edsurge tells you about the shape of the education technology industry.
I 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.