The Future Unicorns of Edtech, intro: New article series from Emerge

We have thousands of conversations each year with our community and we keep seeing opportunities for new companies that really have to be built.

Now, we’re starting a new article series where we’ll be thinking about the market from a founder’s perspective and sharing fresh ideas on the future of learning and work.

Expect short, sharp and raw future of learning and work ideas, intended to help inspire, bring together and even provoke aspiring or existing founders to build more creatively in edtech.

Edtech is booming

At Emerge we see 1,500+ new companies and speak to more than 350+ seed stage founders each year. Compare this to when we started back in 2013 — there are now A LOT more founders in edtech and future of work, which is GREAT.

Data from HolonIQ shows that 2021 was another record-breaking year for edtech. $20bn+ in capital was raised, almost 30% more than in record-breaking 2020 and 41 times more than back in 2010 when edtech started to land on the VC map as a category.

A lot of ideas in edtech still lack differentiation and real innovation

But while edtech continues to boom, we think we are still far from reaching the peak of edtech’s idea and solution renaissance.

If nothing else, many new ideas in edtech sit somewhere between 1990s innovations (’not another one of those LMSs!’) and 2050s hyper-futuristic thinking (’sounds cool, but is the market really ready for hyper-personalised AI-driven education?’)

There is nothing wrong with ideas like these

Sure, we can definitely see another tutoring, educational game or LMS company starting from scratch in 2022 and becoming a unicorn with its own twist on its competitive market. Rewind a few years back and shoutouts go to companies like GoStudent (big shoutout to founder Felix, who is also one of the founding members of our Edtech Founders Club) for reaching escape velocity in the tutoring market with its smart and aggressive GTM and positioning or Eightfold AI for rapidly becoming a leader in the recruitment space thanks to its superior technology.

While rare, we can also imagine another rockstar team finally building an AI solution in education that really needs AI and actually works. Congrats to Duolingo as one of the incumbents and more recently to Atom Learning on raising a massive series A with Softbank and showing that you can bootstrap to strong revenues by selling AI solutions to UK schools.

In busy markets, best execution wins

The education market is a market still full of low-hanging fruit. Often, it has not been the early movers who have won in their markets; it’s been the best executors who have won by navigating the complex world of education. Great ideas in education are relatively cheap. Great executors are rare.

And this is why there is still a lot of potential for companies in busy markets to do really well, especially given the tailwinds and revolution the market is going through, driven by Covid.

We need more crazy, bold, big and unexplored new ideas

While copycats and minor twists on old and existing ideas will continue to dominate edtech and future of work, we could definitely use more innovative ideas.

We would love to see more founders thinking ‘outside of the edtech box’ and really trying to move the needle on something never done before.

Incremental progress on existing solutions is good and often the only progress that educational establishments can handle, but incremental process x 2 or x 3 or even x 10 is more exciting and sets us up better for the 2030s. It also helps better address audiences so far largely neglected by the current waves of successful edtech, like children, working adults and emerging market populations.

Dressing up a 1960s old beaten horse in a Fortnite character outfit is not going to trick kids into consuming the same, but slightly better, education and textbooks that their parents consumed.

We are bringing together our wide edtech network to inspire more innovation

Through the thousands of conversations we have each year with our community we keep seeing opportunities for companies that have to be built. We have too many ideas logged in our OneNotes / Notions, collecting cyberdust, so we’ve decided to start sharing some with the world.

To help inspire and even provoke new founders to build more creatively in edtech, we’re starting this new article series: ‘The Future Unicorns of Edtech’. Expect short, sharp and unpolished future of learning and work ideas that inspire the future. Some from us, some from amazing leaders in our network and some from you.

How to get involved

Are you or someone you know thinking about or working on any fresh and crazy ideas that you think really stand out? If so, please comment below and summarise your idea. We’ll pick a few of the most exciting ones and invite you to collaborate on a short piece together in the near future!

For many pieces in this series we’re aiming to bring together discussion groups with founders, thought leaders, executives and potential customers in our network to take the thinking to the next level. Like this piece or share your thoughts and we’ll make sure you are the first in line to get an invite.

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