A significant moment for European edtech: Emerge Summit 2022

“High stakes, high octane and high value, all day”

It was described by attendees as “wall-to-wall high stakes, high octane and high value, all day”, and “a significant moment for the European edtech ecosystem, accelerating synergies between a very crucial group of leaders for the future of our continent”.

On 19 May we brought together 100 founders, investors and sector experts with the aim of facilitating meaningful connections in edtech. The Emerge community shares a common vision, to democratise access to opportunity, and we believe the way to make change is bottom up, by helping great companies scale to achieve impact globally.

The energy was tangible as edtech leaders flew into London from across the continent — and in some cases, from across the Atlantic — to gather in a venue that could not have been more apt. Tucked away in Whitechapel, East London, the building was once the original headquarters of the Salvation Army, a 150-year-old charity which still plays a noteworthy role in global education, with 2,700 schools and universities worldwide teaching 690,000 students.

Fast forward to today and that building is home to the UK’s first new university in 50 years, Emerge portfolio company, London Interdisciplinary School (LIS). With the Exponential Age presenting us with urgent problems requiring global solutions — from climate change to AI alignment — the world is in desperate need for innovative models of thinking and education. LIS was founded on the principle that education must be interdisciplinary to truly prepare students for the 21st century. Their campus, now hosting its first cohort of students, was undoubtedly the perfect place to host the inaugural Emerge Summit.

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‘The best network of European players in edtech you’ll ever find in one building at one time’
— Mary Curnock Cook, Former CEO, UCAS

The summit was an exciting opportunity to convene the different parts of the Emerge community under one roof, for the first time, from our Edtech Founders Club members, to our Venture Partners, and Learning Partners. All three floors, every stairwell and the courtyard garden of LIS were buzzing with conversation from 8am until 7pm, after which the attendees moved (in a double-decker party bus!) to a secret dinner venue in Shoreditch.

As Kimeshan Naidoo, CTO and co-founder of Emerge portfolio company, Unibuddy, highlights, the summit was a useful respite from day-to-day operations, “When you’re running a company and stuck in day to day details, coming out and seeing what others are doing — the trends and problems — gives you things to take back into the company to help solve your problems.”

Alongside the serendipitous meetings that transpired throughout the day, the community particularly valued the 200 pre-arranged 1:1 meetings that were carefully curated for each attendee. For Irene Klemm, co-founder of Edurino, which received seed funding from Emerge earlier this year, “There is huge value in connecting with people one or two steps ahead, learning how they scaled up and went from 10 or 20 people to 50.”

In addition to networking, there were five professionally facilitated Mastermind groups for Edtech Founders Club members, the “YPO of edtech”. These Mastermind groups were the first sessions of a 12-month experience where top edtech founders at a similar stage get together to share insights and experiences from their journeys, while building deep relationships with peers. There were also five panel discussions hat took place throughout the day, on key topics within future models of education, work and funding them, and a fireside chat with Bernhard Niesner, founder of Busuu. Below, we have summarised the key insights from each of the sessions.

Emerge Summit panel insights and highlights

Future of Higher Education

Panellists: Jack Hylands (FourthRev), Ed Fidoe (London Interdisciplinary School), Michael Bodekaer (Labster), Lucy Stonehill (BridgeU)

“We have a deeply unequal situation at the moment. There is a global talent base but only 6M globally mobile students. How can we use new models of delivery and price points to expand access from 6M to 100M learners?”
— Lucy Stonehill, founder, BridgeU

• Higher education will become less homogenous and more flexible to meet the needs of an increasingly broad and diverse (in terms of age, geography and other characteristics) set of learners.
• Lifelong education, interweaved with people’s lives, will be key. If universities are to broaden their appeal to new audiences, where careers last 50 years and jobs change every couple of years, then it is critical that HE is adapting and evolving in partnership with industry and looking at the alternative credential space.
• The future of education is less vertical. There are a multitude of alternative routes and pathways into HE that need to be expanded and marketed.
• The relationship between research, teaching and learning in HE can make it harder to innovate. Until research itself becomes more interdisciplinary, interdisciplinary degrees will struggle.
• The growing market in developing economies is very focused on the outcome of HE as a stepping stone into a better career and social/economic/professional mobility — what does it lead to, what is the return on investment?

Future of Workforce Development

Panellists: Jonathan Satchell (Learning Technologies Group), Paul Fifield (Sales Impact Academy), Mathieu Nebra (OpenClassrooms), Shay David (Retrain.ai)

“The panel had all been there and done it, and their advice to start ups about the future of work was consistent: listen to the customer, believe the data and – crucially – develop the habit of financial discipline early on.”

— Don Taylor, Emerge (Panel Moderator)

• A core challenge in this market in the past was that employers would prioritise buying talent over building talent. The growing talent shortages and shifting employer mindsets are changing this and thus creating a large opportunity for startups in this space.
• When it comes to go-to-market, selling to HR still remains a challenge, and more success can be found by selling to functional leaders who really feel the pain point.
• Pricing can vary greatly eg Sales Impact Academy costs $100 per month per person while Retrain.ai sells at the price of a coffee per month per person. The pricing really depends on the model (eg software only vs. live instruction).
• The economic outlook means that discretionary training budgets are likely to be cut. However, it is worth noting that the war for talent means that upskilling and reskilling remain core priorities and so there is still reason to believe that these budgets will be resilient.
• Big future opportunities lie in government funding as they take more ownership for training (eg through apprenticeships), and strong opportunities remain in the tech sector; $600bn was raised in VC funding in the last year alone.

Future Pathways into Employment

Panellists: Davide Dattoli (Talent Garden), Ashley Ramrachia (Academy), Ariel Quinones (Ironhack), Boris Paillard (LeWagon)

“We’re competing against the status quo and traditional ways of doing things, not with each other. The real opportunity is how to incorporate the tens of millions of people across the world who are not participating in the tech conversation. The problem is only going to get worse and 10% of the global GDP will be affected. How do we reach all these people? Not by beating each other.”
— Ashley Ramrachia, founder, Academy

• The tech skills gap is immense with a huge shortage of engineers, AI and cyber security expertise. Simultaneously, there is a lack of diversity in the tech world, locked in by the bottleneck slowing down the path of new people into the sector.
• Filling high-growth jobs in tech through non-traditional pathways takes time. When Ironhack first launched, almost a decade ago, attracting students and creating pathways into employment for them was tough. But Ironhack is now reaping the benefits, as the junior developers it initially trained have now become mid-level developers, representing their companies at hiring fairs and are more open to hiring other Ironhackers.
• For younger learners, incentive systems need to change from ‘learning for the sake of learning’ at university, to ‘learning to earn’ in bootcamps, to ‘learn and earn’ programmes. For older learners, we need to adapt the pace of leaning and support provided, but not the pedagogy.
• Hard skills are the minimum threshold to get into a company and role, but beyond that threshold many partners are hiring for soft skills. In the next decade, soft skills will be key, but we are still at an early stage of quantifying them.
• A startup in this space is a long-term commitment — it can take a decade to build something meaningful. Founders need to decide if it’s a business they want to spend the next 10–15 years on, and look after themselves along the way to avoid burnout.

New models in Early Years and K12 education

Panellists: Brett Wigdortz (Tiney), Estelle Lloyd (Macademia), Daniel Zacharias (Sdui), Irene Klemm (Edurino)

“Post pandemic, people are more used to using tech in different ways but there is no silver bullet in education except really outstanding teachers who are well supported. Get the basics right and then think about how to use tech to get to the next level.”
— Brett Wigdortz, founder, Tiney

• The pandemic has had a major impact on this sector: parents feel more responsible for learning with higher spending in the younger age group. Technical infrastructure is improving at home and school and there is a greater awareness of 21st century skills, such as media competency and critical literacy.
• Parents now understand how much they can do at home around their child’s learning journey. Putting educational content into an ecosystem parents already know and use encourages take up and engagement over a long period of time.
• In the past, content provision has tended to dilute after early years and so children turn to Roblox and Minecraft. This is changing and there are signs of children increasingly co-playing with parents.
• Long-term plans need long-term capital, and success in K12 needs long-term vision. Schools need trust, reliability and quality, and any edtech startup must engage three stakeholders: schools, parents, teachers.
• In the future, ‘school’ may become a more flexible, hybrid concept that exists around the learner all the time — an experience that expands beyond the classroom and increasingly involves parents.

Growth investors: why invest in edtech

Panellists: Susan Cates (Leeds Illuminate), Wallace Boston (Green Street Impact Partners), Denis Nikolaev (Prosus)

“We’re really excited about edtech. It’s the earliest of all the segments Prosus has invested in and it has potential like food delivery. It’s a huge vertical, unmatched in terms of potential e.g. leveraging data, scale etc.”
— Denis Nikolaev, Head of edtech investments, Prosus

• Edtech is still a nascent market and we’re only scratching the surface; there is still hunger for more innovation in this space. It is also a very fragmented market and some consolidation is inevitable. TAM is overrated in edtech and can be misleading.
• Building a moat is hard but it is possible to build category-specific, sustainable competitive advantage. Being strategic about collecting data, being data driven and building personalisation algorithms will offer undeniable competitive advantage.
• Areas of excitement include more exposure to career paths and career navigation at earlier ages, flexible talent marketplaces, and skills taxonomies that match and drive training. Specifically European areas of advantage are STEM focused and going global from day one.
• A recession is likely but workforce development and edtech are strong in the long-term.

Cultivating conversation, connection and collaboration

With European Edtech VC investment reaching a staggering $2.5B at the end of 2021, more than triple that of 2020, this is an incredibly exciting time to be thinking about new and innovative approaches to education and employment coming out of Europe — and how we fund them.

The inaugural Emerge Summit was certainly an event to remember, but don’t just take our word for it — in the words of Steve Goldenberg, founder, Interfolio, 2xCEO, and investor:

“I have been to many conferences and summits over my 25 year career and the Emerge Summit was WITHOUT QUESTION the best I have ever attended. The flow of the day was flawless; the topics and content were rich and interesting; and it was tremendously fun from breakfast through dinner. The best part, however, was the network. The curated meetings in particular truly made the day. I feel like I met half the people at the event and every conversation was interesting and meaningful. I woke up at 3am full of ideas and energy.”

As we look to the future, we intend for the Emerge Summit to become a yearly fixture, bringing together the best players in the European edtech ecosystem. We look forward to welcoming you to the next one!

To get to know more about Emerge and the communities we run, get in touch with us at: zara.zaman@emerge.education