Edtech Insiders This Week in Edtech with Ben Kornell, 1/14/22
This Week in Edtech, we focus on
1) Labor Shortages and COVID Contingency Plans
- California Community Colleges Go Online, along with most UC Campuses and Duke
- Staff shortages led to Louisville's school district going back online
2) Edtech VC Firm Owl Ventures Launches 3 Edtech Funds worth over $1B
- Crunchbase
- WSJ
- Economic Times (India)
3) Y Combinator Announced It Would Offer $500K to Companies
- This raises the bar for early stage funding
- New Edtech Accelerators are popping up, like ODX, Workshop Venture Partners, Blue Meridian and Sesame Ventures
4) Around the World
- Europe: Edtech unicorn GoStudent became the highest valued Edtech in Europe with a $300M+ Round
- China: New Oriental Revealed 60,000 Layoffs and 80% Revenue Loss (Bloomberg)
- India: Inc42's Yearly report came out reporting $4.7 Bn in Indian Edtech investing
5) The GSV Edtech 150 was released.
NOTE: After this episode was recorded, a few more interesting developments occurred:
1) Indian edtech LEAD became the first Unicorn of 2022
2) Ellucian bought CampusLogic
3) Modern Campus bought SignalVine
4) School Loan Provider Navient Lost a $1.85B Lawsuit
5) Chinese language Edtech Lingoace completed a $100M funding round