The top emerging edtech companies for higher education in 2024 — edtech 20:20 vision
Higher education edtech is a busy space, and it can be hard to keep up with innovation. At Emerge Education, we want to help you see clearly.
So every year, we publish a list of top emerging edtech companies — crowdsourced from our HE Edtech Advisory Board, chaired by Mary Curnock Cook CBE in partnership with Jisc, and from our expert Venture Partner community, before subjecting the longlist to rigorous analysis. Our aim is to help university senior leaders see what is out there.
“I always talk about just how incredibly confusing and difficult the edtech space is. It is absolutely one of the fastest and broadest areas that I can think of, and the landscape just keeps getting bigger. So we need anything that can give us a handle on simplifying that landscape, maybe give us a few pointers — not only existing companies doing interesting things, but up and coming newer companies that are innovating, especially as a lot of companies are inventing whole new products with AI.
As I talk to companies, my major pitch is: please give us stuff that gives us efficiency gains. Because the HE sector has such financial constraints right now. I am looking for interesting new products to help with teaching and research, but I’m mainly on the hunt for things that can give me efficiency gains. It’s probably an 80/20 split there. Data about size, funding, products, case studies, outcomes that other people have got out of some of these companies is particularly important.”
Gavin MacLachlan, vice-principal and chief information officer, University of Edinburgh
Read on for:
- The full list of top emerging edtech companies, with summaries and insights
- Views from sector experts
- Spotlights showcasing exciting companies
- A series of market maps sketching out the landscape of key players
- We will shortly publish a piece showcasing ‘Ones to Watch’ — very early-stage companies that didn’t quite make the list this year but are working on exciting things!
The HE edtech 20:20 list
Quick overview:
- One third of companies on this list are new entrants — they didn’t feature in our 2023 or 2022 lists
- Almost half of companies have either a female founder (7), a non-white founder (9) or both (1)
- 19/40 companies are from Europe, but all are selling globally
- The youngest company was founded in 2023, while the oldest was founded just over a decade ago
- Funds raised per company vary from just starting out to more than $120m, with a total combined fundraising of almost $1bn
- The list is edtech focused and so does not include big publishers (such as Pearson) or OPMs.
Methodology:
The list is based on public and private data. Crunchbase, Pitchbook and Dealroom are primary data sources where we capture company valuation, funding raised, HQ location and employee data. We leverage LinkedIn as a secondary source for employee data. As an edtech-specialist venture firm, Emerge Education captures our own proprietary data that we use to complete our analysis. The list is crowdsourced, and voted on by our HE Edtech Advisory Board and our expert Venture Partners. Inclusion criteria include:
- Breadth and quality of courses/content/pedagogy
- Quality of features and capabilities
- Industry visibility, innovation and impact
- Strength of clients and geographic reach
- Company size and growth potential
To help you make comparisons, we have divided the list into three sections: Superstars, Rising Stars and Future Stars.
The Big Players
Before we dig into our list of emerging companies, let’s look at the gold standard in HE edtech.
These are the established players — you’ll probably recognise most, if not all, of these names. Every company here has raised $100s of millions and improved access to opportunities for millions of learners around the world. We believe that the emerging companies we will now highlight have the potential to be just as transformational.
Top 10 Superstars
- These companies have been around the longest, on average 8 years
- They have raised more than $50m each, and have big global customer bases among higher education institutions
There are three big changes to our list here. In 2023, our Superstars included Forage (virtual work experience), Outlier (online learning) and Parchment (credentials). All three have been acquired in the past year (by EAB, Savvy and Instructure respectively).
Now we have some new entrants:
- Amboss, showing the importance of medical/vocational universities
- And UWill, as student mental health has increasingly been under the spotlight since Covid.
- And yes, Anthology is a Big Player due to its 2021 merger with Blackboard, but also features here as a Superstar as it is innovating across an ecosystem of CRM, SIS and LMS with Anthology Intelligent Experiences.
SPOTLIGHT ON… Unibuddy
Unibuddy is a recruitment platform, so we’re providing recruitment and marketing teams with a suite of products to increase their student conversion at every stage of the enrollment funnel. The way we do that is facilitating peer-to-peer community connections and community building. So if you are really scaling the human or emotional connections between students, that means prospective students can virtually connect with current student ambassadors, staff or other incoming students along their admission enrollment journey. Universities can gain insights from those conversations and intervene as well participate, so they can be more efficient at knowing student needs in real time and scaling those connections.
We’re partnering with 600 HEIs around the world, working with 90% of UK universities. We’re really pleased to have had the opportunity to help more than 2 million students.
Our customers are universities, but our users are students. I started from the students’ point of view. What do students need? They want to connect with current students to get the right information and know what to expect. So I felt we were in the information business, but actually we’re more in the confidence business. And so we just started digging in: how can we increase that confidence? New generations evolve, and what confidence means for Gen Z differs to earlier generations; the sense of belonging and finding their people is much higher.
We’re building towards a GPS — tell me what I need to do next — rather than telling me the next two steps by email. That combination of knowing what to expect, finding your people and having a clear path is what can help students drive more confidence.
Diego Fanara, founder of Unibuddy, speaking to our HE Edtech Advisory Board
Challenges in this space:
- Growing questions around the continuing value of a degree
- Fragmented legacy technology
- Learners struggle to understand the landscape
Student recruitment has always been about both quantity and quality — quality in terms of diversity and entry qualifications. Now it’s more complex because many courses are loss making due to the freeze on domestic tuition fees. Universities are having to look at the mix across more or less expensive-to-deliver courses as well as international vs domestic fee paying students in order to balance their finances.
Mary Curnock Cook, former CEO, UCAS and Emerge VP
Our predictions for innovation:
- Domestic and international student recruiting practices become more data-driven and predictive.
- The admissions process will become faster, more flexible and more personalised.
- University study will become more modular and flexible, and so will the ways in which prospective students access it.
- Student retention efforts will become more proactive, with an end-to-end view of the student.
Key players
Opportunities for startups:
- AI-powered chat with your uni → Problem: Student support is always overwhelmed/lagging. Solution: A more human-like interface for students to interact with their institution and student support services through chatbot.
We see AI more as an enabler than a replacer. We’ve implemented AI enabling students to have more meaningful conversations. Students were telling us that they want to connect with current students and one another but don’t know what to ask or where to start. There are many basic questions where the information is already available on the website, so we’ve launched Unibuddy Assistant, which is all about triaging questions before they reach a human and suggesting what question to ask based on who you are, what you are afraid of. It’s all about driving more meaningful connections. Diego Fanara
Read more: How startups can support universities with recruitment, applications and student enrolment
Top 20 Rising Stars
Top 20 Rising Stars: Acadeum, Padlet, AstrumU, Blackbullion, Cintana, Elicit, Enroly, BibliU, StudyStream, FourthRev, Goodwall, KnowUnity, Mainstay, Mentor Collective, Morressier, Perlego, ReUp, Stellic, Virtual Internships, Vygo.
- These companies are building momentum and starting to make significant impact
- They have raised between $15m and $50m each
- Compared to last year, we see fewer assessment / proctoring solutions, reflecting a shift in emphasis from the immediate post-Covid era.
- Quite a few companies have raised big VC funding in the past year, including FourthRev, Acadeum, Goodwall, Elicit, Morressier and Perlego.
- Other standouts include Blackbullion, the student money management app, which is now used by 45 HE institutions.
Top 10 Future Stars
- These companies are new players
- Some were only founded in the last 12 months, and the average age is 2 years.
- Eight of these 10 companies are new entrants on the list. Cadmus and Riipen appeared last year, and they have built impressively on those foundations. Most of the rest were founded in the past 2 years.
- All of these companies are powered by AI and/or blockchain technology — six of the 8 new entrants (or 75%) are AI-first companies.
SPOTLIGHT ON… Learnwise
We’re on a mission to make student support more accessible — no matter what time it is, no matter what language you speak, no matter what application you’re on, support needs to be there for you. To put that into context, universities spend close to 40% of their budgets on student support services, academic support and institutional support resources in general. So there’s a lot of money being spent on supporting students, but when a student needs support from the university, they often face a fragmented maze of different tools, services and help desks. Institutions just aren’t set up to handle this type of support at scale, and with overworked faculty members and shorthanded support desks, it can lead to a really poor student experience. That’s why Learnwise is here, to address those challenges by offering an AI assistant that’s always available no matter what app you’re in across your entire educational ecosystem, inside and outside the classroom, to provide you with the support that you need. How do I get a new student card? How do I log in to my Canvas account? So that your institution can stop spending on support and start spending on teaching and learning? You plug in the learning management system, and suddenly I can ask questions like, when is my next assignment due? Or, what did I learn on that PowerPoint presentation from last week? The more data sources we get, the better the experiences for the student.
Some of the most interesting things that I’ve seen are just the new insights that customers get about what type of questions they’re even receiving to begin with. We saw at one institution in the UK, for example, that 20% of all tickets were around replacing student cards. That’s an excellent opportunity where you can add a little bit of automation, a little bit of better FAQ, and reduce ticket volume. Two other interesting use cases would be around mental health support and the desire from students to have more resources available for them, and then to create a workflow to improve the institution’s data. You might have a SharePoint and a website with lots of information, but institutions need help and need a workflow to improve those documents over time, which then, in turn improves the AI answers as well.
We try to meet an institution wherever they are in their digitalization and support journey. So you might have different help desks at every department or you might have already centralised everything, but either way we sit on top of all of those existing services and tools that you have. Integrating with is 30 minutes to build an assistant and we get you live with a very quick, phased roll out a few days later, with large-scale testing with a bunch of user groups from different areas of the institution. So far, qualitative and quantitatively, we’ve really been making impact.
Greg Marschall, CEO, Learnwise
Challenges in this space:
- Student services are under increasing pressure.
- Universities are spending tens of millions each year to support students through financial challenges.
- The impact of poor student experiences can be profound, from distress for students affected to an increased risk of withdrawing.
- Fragmented institutional infrastructure and user interfaces are still major barriers.
Many universities are not sufficiently set up to help students with all their issues outside of teaching and learning. And to the extent that they are, often these services are not joined up and are difficult to access, whether because students don’t fully know what’s available to them or, often more, there is more demand than the service can cope with.
Emma Lancaster, exCEO, Study Group and Emerge VP
Our predictions for innovation:
- We have previously identified opportunities for AI tools that focus on student experience, especially mental wellbeing and social engagement.
- As genAI makes personalisation a real possibility, our understanding of the student body will become much more nuanced.
- As student demographics change, just-in-time support will give way to transformational, long-term relationships that are provider agnostic.
- We will see more differentiation by purchaser, not feature set.
Key players
Opportunities for startups:
- AI-powered chat with your uni → Problem: Student support is always overwhelmed/lagging. Solution: A more human-like interface for students to interact with their institution and student support services through chatbot.
Student experience and success is a very personal and diverse area; students aim to obtain very different outcomes, from finding out what they want to be, to career entry, career advancement, career change, relocation or social aspects like networking. To cater to this very diverse set of demands, the key is to personalise — only digital solutions will enable this kind of personalised student experience at scale and in a financially-viable way. AI will be instrumental in opening up many new ways to cater to this.
Sven Schuett, CEO, IU International University of Applied Sciences and Emerge VP
SPOTLIGHT ON… ESAI
“We are the first of its kind ethical, gamified and affordable AI platform for university applicants and alternative post secondary opportunities. I started this because I used to be an admissions advisor, so I helped students and their families navigate a really chaotic time in the admissions landscape. Right now, if you know anyone who’s applied to university recently, you know students have to navigate things like declining acceptance rates, confusing test policies, tuition increases and so much more. So I really wanted to create a more intuitive and affordable process for students with ESAI. Our goal is to help students navigate everything from programme discovery to college essay support to financial options, all while celebrating their unique story and helping them build out a portfolio that helps them develop their soft skills over time, which is so important for Gen Z right now.
It’s just a super inequitable landscape. I saw it firsthand as an advisor that people were paying tens, sometimes hundreds, of thousands of dollars for elite individualised advising support — and obviously that prices out a lot of students. In US high schools, the average student to counsellor ratio is nearly 400 to one, meaning students aren’t getting that individual support from their schools either. So that’s where we aim to step in and provide some of that same assistance for a fraction of the cost.
It’s been really fascinating to watch attitudes shift towards AI in the admissions process, even in just the past few months. I think a lot of organisations were initially sceptical if it would mean that students were outsourcing their writing or ideas, but what they’re starting to see (and a lot of university policies are starting to reflect this) is that AI is widening access to a lot of opportunities that wealthy students have historically been able to get from independent advisors and tutors.”
Julia Dixon, founder, ESAI, speaking to our HE Edtech Advisory Board
Read more: How startups can support universities with recruitment, applications and student enrolment
SPOTLIGHT ON… Cadmus
We’ve built an assessment for learning platform, in collaboration with the University of Melbourne in Australia. Initially, we were optimised to try and catch students cheating on a problem called contract cheating, which still exists today — it’s a problem not unlike that posed by generative AI in the sense that you can outsource work to a third party, whether to AI or a person, and then submit it as your own. We figured out that ultimately this wasn’t going to drive the outcomes we wanted: more student cheating, catching it and investigations. You can’t create more workload and deliver better outcomes as well. So we ended up changing our product and figuring out that the biggest driver of academic misconduct was actually students feeling unsupported in their learning. We rebuilt our platform with this notion of supporting student learning through assessment, rather than trying to set up assessment to catch students cheating. That was a big aha! moment for us. We ended up reducing misconduct rates by 90% and improving pass rates by around 10%; student attrition rates we reduced by 2.5%, and we improved student experience rates across institutions.
We work with around 50% of Australian HE institutions and a large portion of UK institutions, as well as universities in the US such as Arizona State. For us, it’s about focusing on what’s going to deliver value today, whether it’s on assessment reform or student success or generative AI, and how we actually support mitigating risks to academic misconduct through that as well.
Herk Kailis, founder, Cadmus, speaking to our HE Edtech Advisory Board
Challenges in this space:
- ChatGPT is capable of producing high-quality essays with minimal human input.
- AI’s potential to disrupt media production through its ability to create convincing art, video and audio.
- Certain subjects offer particular challenges for digital assessment.
- Recognition by professional, statutory and regulatory bodies of a range of higher education programmes is critical
Our predictions for innovation:
- Relevant — Enabling universities to go beyond traditional forms of assessment, dictated by practical limitations of analogue exams, and to build systems that are relevant to contemporary needs and reflective of the learning process.
- Adaptable — Effective in addressing the needs of a growing and diverse student population, a range of providers and any number of geographies.
- Trustworthy — Based on solid foundations of academic integrity, security, privacy and fairness.
Key players
Opportunities for startups:
- Classroom recordings (skills assessment and feedback) → Problem: So much rich data is now captured on our performance yet we only get feedback based on what our educators see and at fixed points of assessment. Solution: Tracks all of your classroom engagement and gives you automated feedback against a series of assessment dimensions.
- AI-automated academic assessment → Problem: Assessment is where the majority of educator time goes. Saving time on assessment, both formative and summative, would save institutions billions of dollars. Solution: AI-supported grading could be that solution.
Read on
- Part 1 in this series → How startups can support universities with recruitment, applications and enrollment
- Part 2 in this series → Startups for student success: how technology can help universities create a stellar student experience
- Part 3 in this series → How edtech can help universities support staff and use AI to drive efficiencies in HE
- Part 4 in this series → How will AI transform teaching and learning at universities?
- Part 5 in this series → Plagiarism, proctoring and co-pilots: university assessment in the AI era
- Part 6 in this series → How do universities support graduate employability and career development?
- We will shortly publish a piece showcasing ‘Ones to Watch’ — very early-stage companies that didn’t quite make the list this year but are working on exciting things!
Read more news, views and research from the only fund backed by the world’s leading education entrepreneurs, in Emerge Edtech Insights.
The full list
- Acadeum: quickly expand academic portfolios with in-demand certifications, courses and programs to attract and retain learners — USA, 2016, founders: Nathan Green, David Daniels, Joshua Pierce.
- Amboss: improving healthcare by making medical knowledge universally accessible — Germany, 2012, founders: Sievert Weiss, Madjid Salimi, Benedikt Hochkirchen.
- Anthology: supports learners and institutions with the largest EdTech ecosystem on a global scale, inc Blackboard Learn — USA, 2020.
- AstrumU: use data and AI to help learners measure the most effective pathway from education to employment and quantify the return on investment of educational experiences — USA, 2017, founders: Adam Wray.
- Atypical AI: AI-enabled solutions for personalised tutoring, teaching, and the measurement of student success — USA, 2023, founder: Bethanie Maples.
- BibliU: eTextbook platform providing students and institutions with access to all their content on any device, at any time — UK, 2014, founders: Daniel Engelke, Tao Manatras, Dave Sherwood.
- Blackbullion: award winning fintech platform reimagining the student financial stack — UK, 2014, founders: Vivi Friedgut.
- Cadmus: online assessment platform — Australia, 2015, founders: Herk Kailis.
- Cintana: helps universities reach more students with the education they need and deserve — USA, 2019, founders: Douglas Becker.
- EdMachina: provides artificial intelligence solutions to higher education — USA, 2018, founders: Juan Petrello, Yamil Rabbat.
- Elicit: analyse research papers at superhuman speed — USA, 2023, founders: Jungwon Byun, Stuhl Mueller.
- Engageli: digital learning platform designed from scratch to provide a superior learning experience for students and instructors — USA, 2020, founders: Dan Avida, Gideon Avida, Jamie Nacht Farrell, Daphne Koller, Joe Peter, Serge Plotkin.
- Enroly: — international student recruitment, conversion and compliance automation software — UK, 2017, founders: Jeffrey Williams.
- ESAI: AI-powered college admissions tools for all — USA, 2022, founder: Julia Dixon.
- FourthRev: bridging the skills gap by connecting leading companies and universities to deliver up-to-date, industry-relevant programs — UK, 2019, founders: Jack Hylands, Omar de Silva.
- Goodwall: skills social network for 2 million+ young talent to learn and earn — Switzerland, 2014, founders: Taha Bawa, Omar Bawa.
- Honorlock: remote proctoring services for colleges and universities — USA, 2014, founders: Adam Roth, Elena Soboleva.
- KnowUnity: digital learning platform with summaries, study notes, presentations, answers and more in one app — Germany, 2020, founders: Benedict Kurz, Lucas Hild, Julian Prigl.
- Learnwise: personalized AI support for students and teachers anywhere, anytime — Netherlands, 2023, founder: Greg Marschall.
- Mainstay: developer of a chatbot platform that increases student engagement, enrollment, and success — USA, 2014, founders: Kirk Daulerio, Andrew Magliozzi.
- Mentor Collective: online mentoring support for students — USA, 2015, founder: Jackson Boyar.
- Mizou: create AI chatbots based on your instructions, resources and rubrics, while protecting student data — France, 2022, founders: Hamza Fechtali, Omar Kaab, Vivien Bouancheau.
- Morressier: your partner in early-stage and conference research, extending the value of your event long after it’s over — Germany, 2014, founder: Sami Benchekroun.
- Padlet: enables users to create an online bulletin board to display information on any topic — USA, 2012, founders: Nitesh Goel, Pranav Piyush.
- Pathstream: web-based platform for teaching in-demand tech skills for work — USA, 2018, founders: Eleanor Cooper, Lauren Pizer.
- Perlego: online library that provides students with unlimited access to academic titles with built-in learning tools — UK, 2017, founders: Matt Davis, Gauthier van Malderen.
- Podium Education: provides a digital skills program offering learning experiences that focus on tech skills development and intercultural competencies — USA, 2019, founders: Brooks Morgan, Christopher Parrish, Alex Ricken.
- Proemial: open platform that connects researchers to a larger and more diverse audience through personalised summaries of the latest research papers — Denmark, 2023, founders: Geet Khosla, Mads Rydahl and Brian Pedersen.
- ReUp: leverages data, technology, and coaching to re-enroll students who have left college and support them through to graduation — USA, 2015, founders: Terah Crews, Sarah Horn.
- Riipen: launch and manage experiential learning projects using Riipen’s powerful marketplace and project management tools — Canada, 2014, founders: Dana Stephenson, Dave Savory, Jordan Ell.
- Stellic: AI enabled student pathways and other tools for institutional efficiencies — USA, 2016, founder: Sabih Bin Wasi.
- Studocu: student-to-student knowledge exchange platform where students can share knowledge, college notes and study guides — Netherlands, 2013, founders: Marnix Broer, Sander Kuijk, Lucas van den Houten.
- StudyStream: video platform and online community that allows students to study with others from around the world 24/7 in real time — UK, 2020, founders: Sarujan Ranjan, Erfan Soliman, Ti Xu.
- StudySmarter: develops an intelligent and content-agnostic platform for lifelong learning — Germany, 2017, founders: Maurice Khudhir, Christian Felgenhauer, Till Soehlemann, Simon Hohentanner.
- Unibuddy: helping universities attract, engage and convert student prospects through peer interactions — UK, 2015, founders: Maxence Dussart, Diego Fanara, Kimeshan Naidoo.
- Upright: partners with colleges and universities of all sizes to prepare adults for the future of work — USA, 2021, founder: Benjamin Boas.
- UWill: teletherapy for students — USA, 2020, founder: Michael London.
- VerifyEd: credentialing solution powered by blockchain — UK, 2019, founders: Abi Waterer, Yazel Hakim.
- Virtual Internships: provides transformative, 21st-century remote-work experiences for students and graduates — UK, 2018, founders: Daniel Nivern, Edward Pearce.
- Vygo: helps universities unify and deliver their student support ecosystems — Australia, 2017, founders: Joel Di Trapani, Ben Hallett, Steven Hastie.
🙏 Thanks
At Emerge, we are on the look-out for companies (existing and new) that will shape the future of learning in higher education over the coming decade.
If you are a founder building a business addressing any of these challenges in HE, we want to hear from you. Our mission is to invest in and support these entrepreneurs right from the early stage.
If you are looking for your first cheque funding, do apply to us here. We look at everything because we believe in democratising access to funding (just as much as we believe in democratising access to education and skills).
Emerge is a community-powered seed fund home to practical guidance for founders building the future of learning and work. Since 2014, we have invested in more than 80 companies in the space, including Unibuddy, Cadmus, Engageli and Mentor Collective.
Emerge Education welcomes inquiries from new investors and founders. For more information, visit emerge.education or email hello@emerge.education, and sign up for our newsletter here.
Thank you for reading… I would hugely appreciate some claps 👏 and shares 🙌 so that others can find it!
Nic
