Emerge Education’s 8th Showcase
Timetables, clever speakers, apprenticeships in Africa, and more
🎄 With Christmas around the corner, we are finishing the year on a high with a roundup from Emerge Education’s showcase event at the end of November. Thank you for being with us on our journey as we help exceptional entrepreneurs transform education so that billions of people can lead more fulfilling lives. Enjoy the holidays and see you soon! 🎉
A big thank you to more than a hundred people who joined us in the last week of November to hear six Emerge Education companies — Edval, Edacy, Enroly, OpenCampus, Yoto, and Bibliotech—tell their stories and pitch for investment in front of an audience of angels, VCs, and key decision-makers in education.
As has become our tradition, we also had news of our own to share. CEO Jan Lynn-Matern gave an update on our companies’ track record, highlighting the growth in investment and impact that they have had since joining Emerge, and partner Nic Newman gave a peek at what’s next for us.
Keep reading below for more information about each of the companies and links to their pitches.
Edval
Timetabling the world
🔥 Schools spend weeks cobbling together timetables that barely cover basic requirements. Edval’s hybrid algorithms do orders of magnitude better in minutes — saving schools £100,000’s a year and driving up staff satisfaction and learning outcomes → see the Edval pitch
👤 Michael Emmanuel is group managing director of Edval and has been timetabling schools for the last ten years → get in touch
Edacy
Solving Africa’s skills problem
🔥 90% of business leaders in Africa experience skill shortages. Edacy unlocks the African job market for partners like Unicef and Nestle through Ivy League-level online tuition and on-the-job training for local graduates. 100% of programme participants so far have received job offers → see the Edacy pitch
👤 CEO Temitope Ola is a successful serial entrepreneur and a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer → get in touch
OpenCampus
Higher education’s next operating system
🔥 OpenCampus is improving higher ed administration efficiency by a factor of ten. Universities are stuck in the past, with crucial data hidden away on paper or in spreadsheets. OpenCampus makes it easy for administrators to unlock data silos and design their own processes, positioning it as the new infrastructure standard for HE → see the OpenCampus pitch
👤 CEO Kirsten Heiss, a physician by education, has worked for UNDP, World Bank, and Gartner and has five years of experience deploying university campus management solutions → get in touch
Enroly
Upending international student recruitment
🔥 Student recruitment is a $4.5b market. By connecting with current students to identify the next generation of high-value applicants abroad, Enroly are achieving conversion rates 100x the industry standard. 3 partner universities and 19 agents in 14 countries have signed up to join the platform in just 10 weeks → see the Enroly pitch
👤 CEO Jeff Williams has spent £100m on student recruitment over the past decade. He created Enroly to disrupt a broken industry he knows inside and out → get in touch
Yoto
A clever speaker for kids
🔥 Yoto is a different take on interactive media without screens that’s smart, safe, and lots of fun. Children control the playful cube by slotting in physical cards that unlock an amazing library of curated audio content, built in partnership with the Roald Dahl Literary Estate. Yoto’s Kickstarter campaign hit its target in 5 days and was funded over 150% by the time it closed → see the Yoto pitch
👤 CEO Ben Drury sold one previous digital media company to Yahoo! and grew another to $20m in revenue and a successful IPO → get in touch
And joining us at the showcase for a second time was EE6 alumnus Bibliotech:
Bibliotech
The Spotify for textbooks
🔥 Bibliotech provides university libraries with high-quality electronic textbooks their students need the most. It is the only company in the market to have partnerships with every major UK publisher and full-text search across every book. Students spend twice as much time in Bibliotech as they do on Snapchat.
👤 CEO Dave Sherwood co-founded Bibliotech as a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford, having previously launched an educational charity in Australia → get in touch
