Your Edtech Investor Wants an Open Relationship

The strangest thing about being slowly dumped is that nobody necessarily ends the relationship. They still answer your messages. Your photograph may still be on the shelf. Their toothbrush may still be in your bathroom. But the language changes. They stop talking about the future in quite the same way, their description of what they are looking for becomes broader, and eventually you realize they have changed their type without formally telling you.

That is what is happening between edtech and its investors.

In my last essay, I predicted that between 90% and 95% of today's edtech companies will close, consolidate or become functionally irrelevant. That prediction rests on several different changes that cannot be explained properly in one essay, so I am going to examine them separately.

I expected to begin with collapsing valuations or artificial intelligence replacing educational products. Instead, I found something quieter and, in some ways, more revealing. Edtech has not necessarily been dumped. The investor simply wants an open relationship.

The money left first

Global edtech venture investment reached $20.8 billion in 2021. By 2024, it had fallen to $2.4 billion, a decline of approximately 89%. It recovered only slightly to $2.6 billion in 2025.

Artificial intelligence did not cause that entire collapse. The decline began before generative AI was widely adopted, and much of it was an inevitable correction after pandemic demand, cheap capital and extraordinary valuations produced an investment boom that could not last.

But four years after the peak, conventional edtech investment remains close to the lowest level recorded in a decade. Capital has not simply returned under the same conditions. It has become more selective, more closely connected to employment and more interested in products that can be described as infrastructure, productivity or artificial intelligence. Then the names began to change.

Edtech changed its dating profile

I reviewed the current public positioning of ten investors historically associated with education and edtech. I selected them because of that association, not because their current language supported my argument. They are not a statistically representative sample of the entire venture market, and a website cannot reveal every decision made by an investment committee. But websites do reveal how funds want founders, portfolio companies and their own investors to understand them.

The pattern was not universal. Owl Ventures, GSV Ventures and Rethink Education remain clearly anchored in education. Educapital still describes itself as an edtech and future-of-work fund. This matters because I was not interested in selecting only the investors that had moved away from the word edtech.

But several of the most recognizable specialist investors now describe a much larger relationship. Reach Capital began in 2015 by investing at the intersection of technology and education. Its renewed thesis covers learning, health and work.

Brighteye no longer leads by calling itself an edtech investor. It backs founders building what it calls the "HumanOS," systems that help people learn, work and adapt continuously. Its flagship market report is no longer called an edtech funding report. It is now the Learning & Work Funding Report.

Emerge was founded as Europe's only specialist edtech fund. It now describes itself as a fund for the future of work and learning, investing in everything from early childhood to career navigation and the use of AI at work.

Kaizenvest says that what began as India's first education-focused private equity fund has evolved into a "comprehensive human economic mobility strategy." Its current thesis stretches across education, healthcare, financial inclusion and job creation.

Learn Capital still speaks extensively about education, but it now describes its territory through education and human capital development, including AI-powered learning, workforce training, career advancement and well-being.

The wording varies, but the direction is remarkably consistent. Edtech becomes learning. Learning becomes skills. Skills become workforce development. Workforce development becomes human capital, career mobility, productivity or human potential. Education is still present. It is simply no longer alone.

This is strategically rational. A dedicated edtech fund must find attractive investments inside edtech. A broader investment thesis can follow the same learner into employment, healthcare, recruitment, productivity or AI. It can preserve its expertise while dramatically expanding the number of companies and budgets it can pursue.

From the investor's perspective, it is diversification. From the founder's perspective, it means that the next cheque no longer has to go to someone like you.

Then I checked my own investor

Only after seeing the broader pattern did I look properly at Sparkmind, one of CanopyLAB's investors. I am not observing this industry as an outsider. I have spent more than ten years building CanopyLAB, which sits in one of the parts of edtech most exposed to AI substitution: platforms that create, organise and deliver learning content.

In 2020, Sparkmind was described as a Nordic venture capital fund specialising in edtech. It planned to invest across the educational journey, from early childhood to lifelong learning and corporate training.

Visit Sparkmind's website today and you are presented with two doors: Human Capital and Security. CanopyLAB and the rest of the original education portfolio remain under Human Capital. That fund has invested in 26 companies and is no longer making new initial investments, which may simply reflect the ordinary life cycle of a venture fund. Sparkmind says it will continue supporting its portfolio companies.

From Sparkmind's perspective, the logic is clear. Education, employment, AI and geopolitical security are all being transformed simultaneously, and a broader mandate creates more places to invest. But strategic logic does not make the founder-side consequence neutral. As a founder, the sensation is unmistakable. I am still in the portfolio, yet edtech is no longer the word that explains the firm's future. The relationship continues, but the investor has changed its type.

The recovery appears when the category gets wider

The new language would be less interesting if it were only branding. The funding data suggests something more substantial. In Europe, investment in the broader "Learning & Work" category more than doubled from €710 million in 2024 to €1.6 billion in 2025. That sounds like a dramatic recovery.

But Brighteye's own breakdown shows that conventional edtech, covering schools, higher education and individual lifelong learning, received €471 million. Corporate and workplace learning received €601 million, while the expanded category also includes productivity, recruitment and talent platforms that do not primarily describe themselves as learning products.

This does not make the larger number wrong. Learning genuinely is becoming integrated with work and performance. But it changes what the recovery means.

Edtech funding remains severely depressed. Learning & Work funding is recovering. The recovery becomes much more impressive after the category expands to include companies that edtech investors would not necessarily have considered edtech five years ago. The market may not be returning to edtech. Edtech may be moving to wherever the market has gone.

Then edtech changes itself to stay desirable

Public companies are changing their language too. Guild Education became Guild, placing career mobility at the center of its story. Chegg now calls its academic business "legacy Academic Services", presents Skilling as its growth engine and has expanded into AI model training. Coursera described its combination with Udemy as a comprehensive skills platform for the AI era, while Multiverse now calls itself Europe's AI adoption platform. The products may still teach people, but the pitch increasingly sells career mobility, productivity, workforce performance or AI adoption. These are not identical decisions, and they do not prove that any particular company will succeed. Collectively, however, they show education becoming less prominent in the language companies use to attract customers and capital.

Public companies make category migration relatively easy to observe. Their investor presentations, earnings calls, acquisitions and changing business segments are visible. Private companies are more difficult. Their valuations are not continuously tested by the market, and the strategic conversations between founders, boards and investors remain private. Their websites are therefore especially revealing. They show which part of the company has been chosen for the shop window.

After looking at Sparkmind, I became curious about the companies beside CanopyLAB in the portfolio. Two of them illustrate very different forms of evolution. Neither case proves that the company will survive. Both show how private edtech companies are already changing their public identities and their positions in the technology stack.

Female Invest no longer chooses the edtech category

Sparkmind classifies Female Invest as a lifelong-learning company. In 2021, it was described as an "EdTech platform and community" using subscription-based learning to help women understand personal finance and investing.

The product is still unmistakably educational. Members receive courses, short lessons, financial news, budgeting tools, access to experts and a virtual trading simulator. What has changed is the category Female Invest chooses to present to the market.

Visit Female Invest's website today and the headline is not about edtech, digital learning or course completion. Female Invest calls itself "the money app for every step of your journey." It tells women to take control of their money, practice investing and build wealth. The community, which the company says includes more than 85,000 women from 125 countries, is presented as part of a movement to close the financial gender gap.

The distinction matters. Female Invest is not simply selling a better way to learn about investing. It is selling confidence, financial independence, expert access, identity and participation in a community built around an unresolved social problem.

Its category has been expanding for years. In 2022, Female Invest acquired Gaia Investments, a sustainable investment platform, with plans to integrate actual trading into its product. The current public offering appears to focus on virtual trading and education rather than operating as a live brokerage, so I would not describe it today as an investment platform. But the acquisition revealed the strategic ambition to stretch from teaching people about money towards helping them act on what they learned.

In 2023, Female Invest explained that its new brand identity would expand beyond financial issues and become a stronger voice on gender inequality more broadly. In 2024, it announced an $11 million Series A. Some coverage called it an edtech company. Other coverage called it fintech. Its current branding makes both labels feel incomplete.

That appears deliberate. Female Invest does not need customers to decide whether it belongs in fintech, edtech, media or community. The brand is organized around the problem it wants to solve rather than the software category used to solve it.

Female Invest consists of practical tools that bring the user closer to action. The simulator allows someone to practice before taking a real financial risk. The community provides social reinforcement. The experts create trust in an area where mistakes have consequences. Together, those elements may create a relationship that is harder to substitute than a conventional catalogue of financial courses.

But none of that proves Female Invest will survive. Educational content, market news and introductory guidance are all highly exposed to AI substitution. A community is only defensible if people participate in it, value the relationships and cannot easily recreate the same experience elsewhere. Female Invest is therefore not evidence that purpose and community guarantee survival. It is evidence that a private edtech company can make education only one part of a much larger identity. The company may continue growing while the category used by its investor to describe it becomes increasingly irrelevant to the people buying the product.

imagi is becoming the layer between schools and AI

The second case is imagi, formerly known more visibly as imagiLabs. In 2022, imagiLabs described itself as an edtech startup launching a platform for instructors to teach Python. Its ecosystem included a gamified mobile app, a wearable imagiCharm and a curriculum designed around the interests of pre-teen girls. The proposition was relatively easy to understand: imagi had built its own environment to help children learn how to code. That is no longer the center of the story.

In July 2026, imagi announced a $4.5 million funding round to build what it calls "the safe education layer between AI tools and schools". Instead of asking students to learn exclusively inside an imagi product, the company now gives them supervised access to general AI tools through curriculum, teacher support and safety controls.

The partners are Lovable and OpenAI. Through the Lovable and imagi collaboration, students use AI to build applications while imagi provides classroom access, lesson plans, automatic student setup and teacher training. The company says it intends to integrate additional frontier AI tools.

This is an almost literal example of the change I described in my previous essay. The learning experience is moving into the general AI environment. The edtech company is repositioning itself as the pedagogical, administrative and safety layer between that environment and the learner.

The change is not merely cosmetic. imagi has moved from trying to own the complete destination to managing access to technologies owned by much larger companies. It is no longer only teaching Python through its own interface. It is helping schools decide how children can safely learn with tools that students may already be using elsewhere.

The early numbers are promising, although they are company-reported. imagi says it operates across more than 100 school districts, has reached more than 700,000 students in 140 countries, increased users thirtyfold over the previous year and tripled annual recurring revenue. Its new funding round included Sparkmind alongside Morgan Stanley and individual investors from companies including ElevenLabs, GitHub, Spotify and Lovable.

Again, this does not prove that imagi will survive. It does, however, reveal why the new position may be attractive.

Schools need more than access to a model. They need child safety, privacy, compliance, classroom management, teacher training, curriculum and someone prepared to take responsibility when something goes wrong. Frontier AI companies may not want to customize those elements for every school district, age group and regulatory environment. imagi is attempting to occupy that gap.

If it can own trusted school relationships, pedagogy, implementation and the ability to connect several AI providers, it may become valuable infrastructure. The company would not need to build the most powerful model. It would need to become the safest and most useful way for schools to access whichever models become important.

But the dependency is obvious. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Microsoft, Lovable or one of the large school-platform providers could build more of this layer themselves. They have greater distribution, more capital and control over the underlying technology. I also doubt that the market needs hundreds of independent companies sitting between schools and frontier AI. A few may build defensible positions around geography, age groups, regulation or specific pedagogical needs. Many others may become replaceable wrappers around products they do not control.

That is what makes imagi such an interesting case. Its evolution may be strategically intelligent and entirely consistent with its original mission of helping children, particularly girls, become creators of technology. But the architecture of the company has changed. It now depends on the general AI ecosystem it once might have expected to compete with.

The company has not abandoned education. It has accepted that education may increasingly happen somewhere else, and is trying to become the layer that makes that possible.

Female Invest and imagi do not tell us which companies will survive. They show us how private companies are already responding to the same forces visible among public companies and investors. One has made the category subordinate to purpose, identity and community. The other has moved from being the learning destination to becoming infrastructure around somebody else's AI platform. Both may prove to be excellent decisions. Both may fail. The evidence is not the outcome. The evidence is the movement.

An industry can disappear without everyone dying

I originally imagined the disappearance of edtech as a succession of visible failures: companies closing, valuations collapsing and platforms becoming obsolete. All of that will happen. But industries can also disappear through absorption.

The company survives, but becomes a workforce company. The product survives, but learning becomes one feature inside an AI or productivity platform. The investor survives, but education becomes one possible expression of a much broader investment thesis.

Venture capital was never a marriage. It was never designed for better or for worse. The investor was always going to follow the strongest returns and eventually find an exit. The founder may have entered for a very different reason.

Most people do not spend years building in education because they want to maximize a category multiple. They begin because they care about students, teachers, pedagogy, access or human potential. They want to inspire people, expand opportunity and help someone realize what they are capable of becoming. But once enough external capital is invested, the company acquires another purpose: protecting shareholder value.

When edtech stops attracting capital, that pressure can send a company away from its core. Education becomes skills. Learning becomes productivity. Students become human capital. The original mission remains on the About page while the commercial center moves towards whoever still has money.

Sometimes that is legitimate adaptation. Sometimes it is the only way to survive. But product-market fit should tell a company how to deliver its purpose. It should not be allowed to decide what that purpose is.

Venture capital moves on. The edtech company remains, changing itself into whoever the market might love next. That is how edtech disappears: not when every company dies, but when staying alive requires forgetting why it was born.