All 1,000+ Global EdTech VC Investments for 2018 Mapped
In May this year, we started building the world’s most comprehensive global education intelligence platform. Leveraging proprietary Natural Language Processing algorithms, matched with a team of analysts around the world, we have now indexed over 1,000 venture capital investments in education and education technology for 2018 alone and over 15,000 transactions of all types from the past ten years.
This year, $6B of venture capital investment went into EdTech (almost 2x 2017) and with ByJu’s topping up their Series F this week to $400m at a nearly $4B valuation, this level of investment really is the new normal.
In October, we launched the Global Learning Landscape, an open source taxonomy for the future of learning and talent which thousands of teachers, education leaders, policy makers, entrepreneurs and investors have now reviewed. The Global Learning Landscape taxonomy provides a granular view of the many different ways education innovation is unfolding and provides teams with a common language to discuss and track innovation, investments and trends.
Over the past few weeks, we also hosted invitation-only Roundtables for 300 of our clients, partners and colleagues who collectively invested a notional $500M of venture capital on the Global Learning Landscape to discover where industry experts are expecting future opportunities (more on this early in 2019).
As we close out 2019 however, one question remained. Where did that $6B+ of venture capital go?
Where did that $6B of venture capital go?
HolonIQ tracks every EdTech deal globally and we’ve mapped all 1,000+ transactions for 2018 to the Global Learning Landscape to identify the areas that are attracting the most investment. The heatmap above shows that more than USD $1B has been invested in Language Learning and its close cousin Tutoring this year alone. Not surprising to anyone following the Asian education market and fuelled by a few mega transactions – $500m to VIPKid in June, $350m to Zuoyebang in July and $250m to Yuanfudao in November.
In addition to specific transactions, it’s interesting to note the overall pattern of investment in the verification, credentialing, work and skilling clusters. Although not featuring mega-rounds, there is solid investment in this part of the taxonomy as teams such as Guild, Topica, Meritize and Pymetrics gain momentum.
Tracking of EdTech and education innovation solutions including key metrics and investment data is maintained in HolonIQ’s Global Education Market Intelligence platform. Stay tuned for more high-level analysis through our Weekly Newsletter. For a deeper dive into the underlying data, subscribe to the HolonIQ Platform.
