107 Edtech startups mapped

Meet the 107 ventures shaping the space where education merges with state-of-the-art technology, paving the way for innovations that promise significant financial dividends and foster profound societal advancements.

Photography source: Jana Shnipelson on Unsplash

Exploring Edtech

In this article, you will access a map of European ventures organised into categories, such as Education Providers and Education Management, and learn about the trends accelerating the growth of this space, such as nano learning.

In case you have missed it, EdTech, education technology, refers to solutions that leverage new technologies to deliver educational materials and experiences in a new or improved format. This is an industry expected to be worth $7 trillion by 2025. The combination of education with technology shows excellent opportunity in terms of financial return and the social impact that can be achieved.

While the excitement for innovative solutions targeting education has grown over the last decade, COVID-19 showed the need for creative solutions. The pandemic accelerated the need for solutions to facilitate remote and async learning and bring academic learning closer to at-home parental support. In fact, between 2019 and 2020, European venture capital investment in EdTech start-ups grew by 45%,) with 2020 being a record year in terms of investments in the sector. As Brighteye Ventures reports, the European landscape showed greater resilience than other regions in the slowdown that began in Q1 of 2022, with a total investment for the year of €1.8 billion.

Mapping European Edtech

The mapping you will access below groups EdTech ventures into four main categories based on how each startup supports the user in their learning process, namely:

1. Education Providers — Ventures that offer learning content to their users. This can be done in various ways, split into sub-categories such as MOOC and Alternative Education.
2. Education Management — Ventures offering management systems, Learning Management Systems (LMS), AI solutions to streamline management and similar.
3. Coaching & Tutoring Marketplace— Ventures allows learners to meet tutors or trainers as a marketplace (C2C) or offer more structured learning and development programmes in a hybrid format coach/tutor and digital self-learn pathway.
4. Learning tools and resources — Ventures offer tools, financing, and other support content for learning.

You can access the full list here. Among the four categories above, EdTech solutions can vary greatly, as they can target different stakeholders. We followed the widely used division of pre-K, K-12, Higher Education, Corporate Learning, and Lifelong and Consumer learning to categorise stakeholders. Finally, we have added a sub-category field to help you get an idea of the specific focus of each company (i.e. Code learning, digital library, and workforce development).

There is a common assumption that EdTech solutions overlap with social impact concerning education. However, many solutions do not target underserved stakeholders, or their outcomes do not have significant scale or depth. While there is still much space in the market for solutions that include the stakeholders left behind by education, technology can broaden access to high-quality education, remove the burden from teachers and tutors, and enhance education with personalised experiences. For this reason, we have marked on the right column the ventures we felt have a stronger impact focus (get in touch with us if you think any changes are needed!).