Here is the latest data on “the business of education” for September:
- Amount of venture capital invested during the month: $93.4 million
- Number of investments: 7
- Average investment size: $23.3 million / Median investment size: $5.6 million
- Number of acquisitions: 6
- Number of mergers: 2
- Number of IPOs: 1
- Number added to the “ed-tech dead pool”: 0
Investment Trends
What just happened?! There were only 7 investment deals, according to my records at least, in September. Three of these did not disclose the amount of money that was raised, so the investment total of $93.4 million isn’t quite right (and is comprised almost entirely of the $80 million raised by celebrity “teaching” platform Masterclass).
That figure doesn’t make September 2018 the lowest month for investment dollars since I’ve been keeping track. That was back in September 2015. But this month was the lowest in dollars invested since November 2016, and it was the lowest month – again, since I’ve been keeping track– in terms of the number of investments made.
2018 does still appear to be on course to be a strong year in terms of the amount of money invested in education startups. But the number of investments is way, way down.
Perhaps the tech industry’s billionaires are opting to go the “philanthropy” route instead of the VC one. In related news, I have created a new page here on this site to show where the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative money is going. (This is not easy to track as the company is not a foundation and therefore not terribly transparent about its “giving.”)
The Biggest Investments of 2018 (So Far)
This list has not changed since last month, but here it is nonetheless -- the companies that have raised the most money in 2018:
- VIPKID (tutoring): $500 million
- Zuoyebang (tutoring): $350 million
- 17zuoye (tutoring): $200 million
- DreamBox Learning (adaptive learning): $130 million
- Zhangmen (tutoring): $120 million
- Connexeo (school administration software): $110 million
- DadaABC (English language learning): $100 million
- Knowbox (tutoring): $100 million
Download the Data
Just a reminder: 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.)