Education is an industry that is about to go through a radical transformation. The education system you experienced as a child will not exist by the time the next generation of children graduates, full stop. There are many startups as well as established businesses that are driving this innovation. Here we look at the most valued edtech startups in the world, based on publically available valuations.
It’s worth noting that of these top 10 most valued edtech startups, 9 are based in the United States with the extra 1 based in Canada. As a consequence, while many of the other verticals within tech are increasingly representing a more global distribution of leading businesses, education technology remains dominated by the USA for the time being.
Utah-based Pluralsight is by far the leader at the moment as it’s valued at $1 billion, which is double Instructure’s valuation, standing at $554 million and coming in at second place. Focused on providing online training for developers and IT professionals, it seems to be uniquely well positioned to help address what many tech companies argue is a serious technical and engineering skills shortage in the industry.
Another business that is extremely well positioned to address an important need is Florida-based Open English, which valued at $350 million comes in at fifth among the top 10 most valued edtech startups in the world. Open English, as the name suggests, is focused on delivering a high quality English language education to people around the world through online courses. It’s a startup we should expect to see a lot more of over the next few years as the demand for English language education increases, particularly in Asia.
A very different education technology startup, but nonetheless extremely interesting is Lumos Labs. Valued at $265 million, it lands at eighth place on the list of most valued edtech startups. This startup’s goal is to improve people’s core cognitive abilities through fun web and mobile games. So far there are more than 50 million users who are challenging themselves with the Lumos Labs’ 40 games.
And finally, another startup that stands out is Clever, which, contrary to most of the other businesses on this list of the most valued edtech startups, is focused on improving education for children who have yet to graduate from school. Valued at $247 million, the business has built a platform that helps teachers track their students’ performance as well as provide students access to all their learning materials with one login.
When we went through the education system we couldn’t even dream up of all these innovations and now they are about to transform how we learn as children as well as how we improve our skills as adults. Get ready, education is about to become much more data driven, engaging, and, most importantly, fun.
