🚀 This Week in EdTech 🚀 (Issue #19)

9 May - 15 May 2022

🚀 This week in EdTech 🚀

💥 Following last week’s slew of layoffs in tech, this week had another dose of staff cuts across tech companies in a range of industries including EdTech. Last week, On Deck cut 25% of staff (c.72 people) and scaled back its accelerator and this week Section4, an up-skilling startup launched by prominent NYU professor Scott Galloway laid off a quarter of staff. Read more here.

💥 Do you know any edtech job seekers? Join Owl Ventures on May 24, 10:00am - 12:05pm PST, for a virtual job fair for tech and product roles at some of their fast growing portfolio companies including Mighty Networks, Untapped, Panorama Education, SV Academy, Workera.ai, Welcome Tech, Thunkable and Woebot Health. Sign up here.

💥 VC firm Educapital recently announced that it has reached the first close of its second fund. The team has already secured $105 million and now wants to reach $160 million to invest in edtech startups as well as companies working on the future of work. Read more here.

Notable raises:
💰 Remote hiring company Deel raised $50m. The company recently made headlines for crossing the $100m ARR threshold. The company’s customers include Coinbase, Dropbox, and Shopify, among others.

💰 WizeHire, a hiring service for SMBs, raised $30m. Its customer base doubled in 2021, to 15,000 employers, and ARR is c.$10m.

💰 iNurture, the online learning platform for students, raised $15m. It has partnered with over 30 university campuses across India and offers over 50 programmes on campus. It has registered over 15k students in its programmes. 

💰 TechWolf notched $10m to build real-time skill insights. Using AI-driven skills intelligence, the startup claims to deliver an instant, up-to-date and unbiased view of skills across the workforce.

💰 Elemeno Health raised $7m. Designed by former nurses for nurses, Elemeno provides clinicians with a unique “playbook in your pocket” for enhancing patient care and executing day-to-day tasks efficiently.

💰 AboveBoard raised $6m to help underrepresented professionals in executive roles. After launching in October 2020, AboveBoard landed over 6,000 executives and 400 companies by July 2021. Now, the company has over 30,000 approved members and 1,300 companies.

💰 GitStart raised $5m to help understaffed tech teams distribute coding tasks to junior engineers worldwide. With GitStart’s developer community, engineering teams farm out coding tasks to junior engineers worldwide.

💰 Hono raised $5m. Hono has over 300 clients including IndiGo Airlines, NBC Bearings, among others. Hono has over 1 million employees on its AI-backed platform and achieved growth of 2X during FY22.

💰 Atma raised $5m. The platform targets the lower and middle-income segment of the working-age population in Indonesia, or people earning less than 10m IDR a month (or about $700 USD).

💰 Leland raised $4m. Leland is taking on the coaching space with a focus on helping people navigate their careers — whether that is landing admissions to their dream business school or finally pivoting into VC.

💰 JoshTalks raised $3.5m. The startup has an average of 85m monthly views across platforms and has forayed into interactive educational courses by launching the Josh Skills app which has over 200,000 paid subscribers.

💰 Manara raised $3m for its cohort-based training ­­platform geared toward growing the tech-talent pool in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

💰 Guider raised $3m. Guider is a mentoring platform aimed at helping large companies improve employee retention, staff wellbeing, D&I and personal development. Customers include companies such as M&S, Deloitte and The Guardian.

💰 Romanian startup Adservio raised $2m. The company helps K-12 schools be more effective and strengthen their connection with families. The platform supports over 1,000 schools and has more than 750,000 monthly active users.

💰 ForeignAdmits raised $430k. ForeignAdmits is an end-to-end study abroad platform for students and agents that gives peer-to-peer mentoring. The company has grown 10x in the last 12 months across various business growth parameters.