Before the coronavirus made edtech more relevant, historically companies in the sector would have seen slow and low exits. Despite the successful IPOs of 2U, Chegg and Instructure in the US, public markets are not crowded with edtech companies.
Some of the biggest releases in space include Lynda's LinkedIn scoop for $ 1.5 billion in cash and stock and TPG's purchase of Ellucian for $ 3.5 billion.
But both deals were made in 2015. Five years later, edtech is more interesting and on the rise, but is it seeing releases? I'm Lynda and one-off ellucian success stories?
2U co-founder and CEO Chip Paucek said he was optimistic.
"We are a rare edtech IPO," he told ProWellTech last week. "For a long time at edtech it was" sell to Pearson or not "".
Despite the industry's sluggish past, Paucek said now is a good time to start an edtech company because the industry is "finally starting to step up" with more back-end infrastructure and online training demand.
This morning, let's use some data to paint a picture of the edtech release landscape and bring some balance to this boring stereotype.
There were about 225 edtech acquisitions between 2003 and 2018, according to data from Crunchbase. RS Components sent me a chart in March to put this time frame in context a little more:
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