As Thierry Heles noted at the start of this week’s Global Venturing Review podcast, based on Rob Lavine’s trends analysis of last year, one of the big shifts in 2020 was the surge in educational technology providers, with China leading the way.
That was before a flurry of large rounds in the space right before the end of the year, the biggest being a $1.6bn series E round for online tutoring platform developer Zuoyebang that included Alibaba and SoftBank Vision Fund 1.
Zuoyebang’s overall funding now stands at roughly $2.9bn, some 80% of which has come in the past seven or so months.
This is perhaps little surprise given the covid-19 disease has forced many more students to study at home or online.
As award-winning teacher Erik Vermeulen puts it in his blog : “Student behaviour and expectations are rapidly changing — mainly due to peer and performance pressures.”
This is creating tensions as incumbent schools and universities and education service providers react to what Vermeulen called “an informal learning environment of self-learning and more collaborative co-learning”.
In the face of a surge in edtech startups, the incumbents and other corporations are piling in.
The implications of online video platform Youtube being probably the most used education service and how artificial intelligence and data scraped insights on people from their earliest ages are used is still to be explored.
But governments control their populations education materials for a reason. As the Jesuits say: “Give me a child until seven and I will show you the man.”
