B2B edtech

1. TikTok-style edtech goes viral

   TikTok is changing how we learn. The video app has tips aplenty — from how to make a belting laksa curry to ways to climb the greasy corporate ladder. Companies such as London’s 5Mins.ai are producing TikTok-styled upskilling videos, while Austria’s AdaGrowth — with the catchy promise to “put a mentor in every woman's pocket” — sends employees daily two minute videos, with lessons like the "eyelid closure technique" aka if you keep your eyelids closed for a little longer than a normal eye blink, you can “elegantly signal to your colleague to get to the point,” the app suggests.

   Dublin-based zick learn offers a small twist: it breaks up long, tedious onboarding documents for new employees into short burst text messages, rather than videos.

2. Skills for days

   Startups offering online coaching, tutoring and mentoring are mushrooming.

   Recent success stories include a pair of digital coaching startups: France’s CoachHub, which raised a $200m Series C in June 2022, and Berlin’s Sharpist, which scooped a $23m Series A four months prior.

   On the tutoring side, you have companies like France’s Ada Tech School — yes, the references to computer pioneer Ada Lovelace in edtech are frequent — which, like Skiller Whale, wants to bolster your company’s technical skills.

   As a complement to company internship programmes, the USP of Amsterdam-based Hello Mentor is to facilitate company mentor schemes: the startup says that almost half of people hired via mentorship stay more than four years, versus 25% from job boards.

   The big way for all these sites to edge ahead of the competition? Increasing their language base by hiring multilingual tutors and coaches, to expand beyond their domestic markets.

3. VR training makes small strides

   We’re seeing more companies emerging with ideas to supplement their education offerings with VR. Oslo’s Skillup, for example, invites medical students to assess virtual patients. Liverpool-based FocusXR has a content library of (mainly) workplace safety videos you can watch with a VR headset clamped to your face.

   London’s VirtualSpeech has a potentially brilliant use case for VR — to practice public speaking (in front of a room of avatars). The startup will also let you use VR to pitch to a digital colleague in a virtual elevator.

4. Following the green owl

   Purveyors of gamified education don’t have to look further than the Duolingo app for inspiration: the world’s favourite — and most meme-d — green owl is a publicly traded company with 500+ employees and a $6.7bn market cap.

   An interesting spin on Duolingo comes from Finland’s Elias Robot, which helps you learn multiple languages via a small robot that you can hook up to an app. Oslo-based Capeesh, meanwhile, creates gamified digital training courses designed for “your organisation’s language minority speakers”.

5. Hey, we have AI plans too!

   It’s near-mandatory for edtech startups to be integrating AI into their products — even those that previously didn’t have any AI plans before 2023’s chief tech boom got underway are beginning to look at immediate uses in the workplace.

   New Enterprise Associates (NEA), one of the world’s biggest VC firms, made a rare bet on a European startup in May: Stockholm-based Sana Labs. The edtech, which helps employees manage information at work, says it wasn’t even looking for money — flush with cash after a $34m Series B in December — but US-based NEA made a “proactive offer”.

   The main draw for NEA was the company’s “AI learning analyst”, which can help create dashboards, answer performance questions and automate actions. Expect a rush of similar AI tools from edtechs in the near future.

6. The ‘switch off’ debate gains momentum

   The move toward a tech-driven, personalised learning system faces some resistance.

   Sweden announced in August that it wanted to reverse the decision by the national agency for education to make digital devices mandatory in preschools. It plans to go one step further and ban digital learning for children under age six.

   For now, companies enjoy the convenience of online and on-demand services, but there could come a moment when overworked employees demand less screen time too. The number of people using online learning resources has also dipped on average in the EU, according to a 2023 Eurostat survey — 26% of 16-74 year olds used them in 2022, compared to 28% the year before.

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