Hello friends! 👋
Last week was a big week. CogX happened, and I dropped in on a few virtual sessions. I was excited to hear Daphne Koller, the Coursera and Engageli co-founder among others, talk about the future of education. She never thought online learning will replace universities, but the pandemic reinforced the fact that more than half of undergraduates aren’t traditional. Universities cannot expect them to come on campus to get their education, so a mixed approach to delivery will have to remain. In other sessions on trends and early stage funding, it was clear: there is a big bias towards K12 and corporate learning, because of the volume of users and budgets (and hence market size). HE isn’t as exciting 🧐
And here’s some more proof from this week:
Immersive Labs that offers upskilling in cybersecurity raised $75 mil
Apna, another upskilling platform in India, raised $70 mil
Classplus, an app for educators, is raising $30 mil
Formative, a webapp that educators can use to follow student learning, raised $70 mil
📊And in the latest tech moves that researchers might be interested in:
The graph database platform Neo4j raised $325 million, new stuff is about to be built?
BookClub is a very neat US-based platform for authors that want to organize their own book signing and reading and much more; raised $20 million
🎧Some major releases in audio:
Facebook announced new podcasts product, with clipping features 👍
Spotify Greenroom is almost out, the latest Clubhouse competitor, sounds like a fan audio channel about to burst
Lore looks impressive, combining audio with learning analytics, I will be watching them!
Have an absolute blast of a week!