Here is the latest data on “the business of education” for October 2018:
- Amount of venture capital invested during the month: $242.6 million
- Number of investments: 12
- Average investment size: $20.2 million / Median investment size: $11 million
- Number of acquisitions: 10
- Number of spinoffs: 1
- Number of mergers: 1
- Number of IPOs: 0
- Number added to the “ed-tech dead pool”: 1
Investment Trends
Although the amount of money invested in education companies ticked up this month (following very low levels of investment in August and September), it’s worth noting that almost half of the total invested went to one company: BYJU’s. This is a test-prep/tutoring company, and this sub-sector of education companies remains the best funded – this year as in previous ones. Just a reminder: tutoring exacerbates inequality by expecting families to pay for education (as opposed to, say, publicly funding high quality education for everyone). So congrats to everyone who’s in on this one, notably this month Arielle Zuckerberg – yes, that’s Mark’s little sister. And yes, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is one of BYJU’s many investors
The Biggest Investments of 2018 (So Far)
The companies that have raised the most money so far this year (not including the venture capital firms that have raised new funds):
- 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
- BYJU’s (tutoring): $100 million
As far as I can tell, these are now the most well-funded ed-tech startups (that is, those education companies which have not gone public):
- SoFi (student loans): $2.156 billion
- VIPKID (tutoring): $825 million
- CommonBond (student loands): $803.6 million
- DadaABC.com (English language learning): $608.9 million
- Zuoyebang (tutoring): $585 million
- 17zuoye (tutoring): $585 million
- BYJUs (tutoring): $344 million
- EverFi (“critical skills” training): $251 million
- Yuanfudao (tutoring) –- $244.2 million
- Coursera (online education): $210.1 million
- Knewton (adaptive learning): $182.3 million
- Age of Learning (educational apps): $181.5 million
- DreamBox Learning (adaptive learning): $175.6 million
- Udemy (skills training): $173 million
- AltSchool (private school; learning management system): $172.9 million
- D2L (learning management system): $165 million
- Udacity (skills training): $160 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.)