We hope you are all staying hydrated and coping well in the heat – maybe even taking a little bit of time off! Not too much of that here, we’re keeping busy learning new things and we've even announced a new investment since our last update. Events season is around the corner again, and we’re raring to go – we hope to catch up with many of you in the coming months!

This update includes:

• Investment Update – imagi's $4.5M Seed round

• Insights – New blog series called “In Plain Sight”

• Events – AI in Learning panel at TechBBQ in Copenhagen

We hope you will enjoy!

Best,
Team Brighteye

🔵 INVESTMENT UPDATE

🔵 New investment: imagi’s $4.5M Seed round

Congrats to imagi on the recent $4.5M raise - to build the safe education layer between AI tools and schools! We're super happy to have led the Seed round together with Day One Capital, with participation from Feminvest Ventures and We Are Human.

imagi has already given more than 700,000 students in 140 countries access to safe, compliant and pedagogically sound AI. The fresh funding will be used to keep expanding access to structured AI learning for students and teachers in the US and beyond.

Our Founding Partner Benoit Wirz said: ❝imagi sits at the intersection of two of the most important trends in education: the mainstreaming of AI and the urgent need for structured, safe digital literacy. ⚡️Dora Palfi, ⚡️Beatrice Ionascu and Sari Hurme-Mehtälä ⭐️ have built a product that schools can actually trust, and the traction they've achieved so far speaks for itself.❞

The over-subscribed round also includes a notable group of angels spanning founders, operators, and educators.

In the ❝Why we invested in imagi❞ write-up, Ben goes into more detail, including on the imagi opportunity and what convinced us to back the Sweden and New York-based company.

Why we invested in imagi

🔵 INSIGHTS

🔵 «In Plain Sight» - new weekly blog series

«In Plain Sight» is a new weekly blog from our Head of Platform & Research Rhys Spence. In each edition he focuses on a thorny topic within investing, learning and work, startups and policy.

In the first post, «Universities still treat careers like the small print» Rhys dove into how universities tell prospective students a lot about what they’ll study, but surprisingly little about where it might take them. Too often, careers appear at the bottom of a course page as a short, generic list of jobs, as though they’re an afterthought rather than one of the main reasons people choose to study.

In the second post, he looked into «When AI writing feels like lying (and when it doesn’t)». The article explores a growing backlash against AI writing, including in personal communications that “feel” AI-written. He ponders on the evolving question: What happens to how we treat each other once we can’t tell the difference between AI writing and stuff we’ve written ourselves?

In the third edition, «The rising tide of employee secondaries», out last week, Rhys looks at why giving employees some liquidity along the way when building a venture can strengthen alignment, help founders retain more ownership and recycle talent back into the startup ecosystem. He presents some benefits, potential frictions and advice on how to treat secondaries.

«In Plain Sight» is published every Thursday morning at 8am UK/9.00 CET.

Later this week «In Plain Sight» 4 focus on how children are learning about climate change in the post «Europe is burning – what should we teach the next generation?»

🔵 Building design partnerships

We loved running the Brighteye Founder Studio this spring and summer. And we loved all the amazing contributions we got from founders, senior operators and corporates sharing their knowledge. In a series of articles we will share our takes on some of the content from sessions hosted during the 12-week residency, starting this week with the GTM workshop we ran with with Meg Porter ✨ and Sophia Ahrel FCIM on how to build design partnerships that create genuine commercial insight rather than bespoke, unpaid work.

The central lesson is in the title of the blog: “Design the partnership before you sign the partner.”

That means being explicit about:
- The three to five things you need to learn
- What each side will contribute and receive
- Who can buy, who will champion and who will use the product
- How success and willingness to pay will be measured
- What happens when requests fall outside the agreed scope

Read the full post here!

🔵 EVENTS

🔵 Co-hosting TechBBQ Grill Session

We’ll be heading to Denmark very soon, kicking off the H2 events season at TechBBQ in Copenhagen next week. Isabella Vahdati and Hege Tollerud from team Brighteye will be there, and we are happy to have teamed up with Owl Ventures to co-host a Grill Session Panel on «The future of AI in Education & Learning.»

AI is already reshaping how people learn and how education is delivered, in the classroom and beyond - but what comes next, and who’s building it?

The panel brings together founders and investors at the forefront of AI in education, spanning education innovation, impact investing, and venture capital. Together, they’ll unpack how AI has already changed learning, where it’s headed next, and what founders and funders are watching closely as this space evolves.

Hear from:
Bue Fisker, Director of Investment, The LEGO Foundation Investments
Isabella Vahdati, Principal, Brighteye
Kasper Hulthin, Founder & CEO, SAGA
Kim Rants, Founder & CEO, Alice
Victoria Longhi, Associate, Owl Ventures – moderator

Find us in the Blue Grill Session (Hall E) at 10.00 CEST on Wednesday 26 August!

Full TechBBQ details here.

🔵 Aspiring Female Partners: Atoms, bytes and term sheets

Daniela Duca at Samos, Kirsten Meehan from Omnea and Brighteye’s Izzy Vahdati are excited to invite you to the first Aspiring Female Partners event of 2026. Aspiring Partners was born from a simple but urgent mission: to see more women in decision-making roles in venture capital.

Join them in London on Wednesday 9 September for a deep tech-focused panel featuring Aleksandra Pedraszewska, Partner at Vastpoint, Aurelia Liechtenstein, Co-Founder at Proximo Ventures, Isabel Zhang, Investor at HCVC, and Dr Claire Thorne, Venture Partner at Deep Science Ventures.

​The event is organised in collaboration with Lucinda Goldklang, who leads Odin’s Capital Network.

Register your interest to join here

🔵 See you at the Nordic Edtech Summit?

Back in the Nordics, we are looking forward to the Nordic Edtech Summit in Oslo on 9 September. Our Head of Community & Events, Hege Tollerud will be on stage for a Hot Seat conversation with Co-Founder and CEO Hugo Wernhoff at Kognity. There are still a few spaces left, make sure you grab your ticket now!!

The football World Cup is over, Wimbledon is over and the golf Open is over. For us, the biggest event that is just over is the Brighteye Founder Studio. 12 weeks of amazing inspiration, connections, energy and hard work. Last week our Founders performed the grand finale – signing out with a spectacular Demo Day show. We’ve shared a recap of the show and added some reflections on the experience from the Founders and our team below!

We wish our cohort all the best on their journeys ahead - we will be watching!

Now, we will turn to our next projects and share a general update, including:

• Investment Update – sherpa’s $2.2M pre-seed

• Insights – Our European Learning & Work Funding Report H1 2026

• Events – The Founder Studio Demo Day

We hope you’ll enjoy our summer update – have a great rest of July!

Best,
Team Brighteye

🔵 INVESTMENT UPDATE

🔵 New investment: sherpa’s $2.2M pre-seed

We’re proud to be part of sherpa’s $2.2M pre-seed round - sherpa is the first agentic-native operating system for external workforce management. We’re pleased to be investing alongside Seedcamp, DN Capital, Activant Capital & many more.

Rather than another system of record, sherpa’s AI agents actually run the workflows: scoping requirements, classifying worker types, sourcing and screening candidates, coordinating approvals and onboarding, monitoring delivery and spend. It sits as an invisible layer within the existing enterprise stack, no rip-and-replace required.

In his write-up of “Why we invested” in sherpa, our Partner David Guérin writes:

We believe the bottleneck in the future of work is shifting from finding talent to coordinating, governing and executing external work at scale. Marketplaces solved discovery; Sherpa is building the operating infrastructure for what comes after. We are excited to back Tristan Deschler, Tim Altpeter and Maximilian Lang!

Read the full blog post on Sidekick here:

Why we invested - sherpa

In sherpa’s own words: ❝This is base camp. The climb starts now.❞
Read their full story here!

🔵 INSIGHTS

🔵 The H1 2026 European Learning & Work Funding Report

Our European Learning & Work Funding Report H1 went live on Brighteye Sidekick this week!

The headline numbers:
🔹 €1.4bn raised across 178 deals - already closing in on all of 2025's €1.6bn (334 deals)
🔹 More ‘Late Stage’ (Series C+ deals) closed in H1 2026 than Early Stage or Seed deals
🔹 Capital is concentrating - the top 10 deals now account for ~76% of funding, up from ~55% in 2025 (though skewed by Legora's €525M round)

Back in January, our full-year report flagged a structural shift - European Edtech moving beyond its traditional boundaries, with capital increasingly converging around a broader Learning & Work stack: skills, talent, hiring, workforce management, professional workflows, and productivity.

Six months on, the H1 2026 data confirms that this shift isn't slowing down, it's accelerating.

The H1 report focus on two main threads and where they intersect:
1) Core Learning & Work - later-stage, capital-intensive, scaling fast
2) Broader Productivity - powering most of the Seed and Early-Stage activity, and where the biggest cheques (legal, HR, workforce learning, professional software) are landing on products with clear, measurable ROI

Read the full Report and listen to David Guérin and Rhys Spence break it down on this week's Sidekick FM podcast:

Read & Listen here

🔵 New blog: Who certifies AI agents?

AI agents need certifications, just like humans. But wait... who will certify them? We are all quickly depending on AI agents as a new type of worker, or at least a new type of co-worker. The problem is that we currently have no simple way to know whether these agents are actually qualified to do the work they claim to do.

In the latest blog on Brighteye Sidekick, Partner David Guérin explores challenges and opportunities connected to the certification of AI agents, on the same level that we rely on certifications and professional qualifications for humans to create trust in jobs being properly done.

Read the full story on why “we think a new category will emerge around certification infrastructure for AI agents” here:

Who certifies agents?

And, if you are a Founder building in this space – we’d like to hear from you!

🔵 EVENTS

🔵 Founder Studio Demo Day – oh what a DAY

What a performance Our Studio Founders pulled off at the Demo Day- the Day featured 13 brilliantly-delivered presentations within learning and work tech categories like Productivity, K12 and HE, New OS, Productivity, Talent and Languages.

We’re still smiling, reliving the moments of a room full of energy and talent, celebrating the Founder Studio Demo Day show at the HSBC Innovation Banking London HQ last Wednesday, 15 July.

We have enjoyed every moment with the Founders over the past 12 weeks and they did us proud, delivering fantastic pitches to a room filled with near 150 fans in the form of investors, customers, founders and wider community.

Way to go - Tugo Tutors - Hugo Cheyne & Hugo Harrabin // Jinna.ai - Andrei Yemelyanenka // Lanura - Jenny Guo // New London School - Asan Kurmanguzhin // OGIMA - Kaan Arslan // Fluum - Roberta Morelli Pedersoli // NoSocial -Yasir Khokhar // Renlo - Matthew Barlow // Luku - Hanna Kettunen // Majira - Stéphanie Thiagharajah & Bruno Falempin MBA MSc Finance // Nousable - Nir Aviv & Marom Bracha // Madlen - Ata Ozkaya // Drimmly - Alexis Sanz Fargeas

A short video of the action, as well as one with first reflections on achievements from the Founders below – there’s more to follow, we promise!

The Show:

The achievement reflections:

🔵 Recap of a FuN evening

It was great FuN to welcome the FuckUp Nights London community to an evening focused on past mistakes and failures made whilst building in the world of learning and work tech.

We were all treated to two wonderfully open conversations with James Weatherill and Pavan Konanur, moderated by Saul Truman, on their experiences.

The global concept of Fuckup Nights, hosting events in 300+ cities around the world, is dedicated to totally honest sharing around building enterprises, the inevitable mistakes along the way and the learnings made from them.

Loads of conversations on the floor, too, as you can see below:

Coming up…

🔵 Grill Session at TechBBQ

Our preparations are well underway for TechBBQ in Copenhagen in late August – where we are excited to partner with Owl Ventures to host a Grill Session on Learning & Work. Make sure to be in the room for our panel on Day 1, Wednesday 26 August - where you’ll hear from:

• Bue Fisker, Director of Investments at the LEGO Foundation Investments

• Kim Rants, Founder & CEO of Alice Tech (YC Combinator W25)

• Isabella Vahdati, Principal, Brighteye

• Kasper Hulthin, Founder & CEO of SAGA (exited Founder of Future Five)

• Moderator: Victoria Longhi, Associate at Owl

See you in Denmark?

Happy Summer!

We’ve reached the final day of June, Q2 and H1. A lot’s been going on and there’s a lot more coming. First of all, sadly, our Founder Studio programme is coming to an end in a few weeks. We’ll miss the buzz on our ground floor and zoom channels, but we’re not letting our amazing cohort go quietly. On 15 July we are bringing them all onto the big stage to pitch their products and their progress at our Demo Day. More info and link to register below.

There’s a lot more going on, too, in the past and ahead - please enjoy our latest update, including:

• Investment Updates - A couple of announcements coming up!

• Selected News from the Portfolio - Coachbetter signs The German Football Association

• Insights - Check out Sidekick FM, our new weekly Podcast

• Events - Founder Studio Demo Day 15 July

Have a great week – and July, and Q3 and H2!

Best,
Team Brighteye

🔵 INVESTMENT UPDATES

Coming soon…

We have a couple of exiting new investment to announce in the coming weeks - make sure to follow us on LinkedIn here to not miss the Big News!

🔵 SELECTED NEWS FROM THE PORTFOLIO

Ornikar acquires En Voiture Simone

It was great to recently learn that En Voiture Simone has been welcomed to the Ornikar Group, the all-in-one platform for learning to drive, finding instructors and getting insured - and one of our early investments. The operation reinforces the French company’s ambition to build a leading player in mobility, capable of supporting the new generations at every stage of their career, from licence training to insurance. Check out the full post here!

Coachbetter strikes DFB deal

This month we were thrilled to first share our portfolio company Coachbetter’s $8.2M Pre-Series A round close. Then the Swiss scaleup building the operating system for football clubs disclosed the final investor in the round – and a massively important commercial and strategic partner: The German Football Association DFB 🇩🇪 – the world’s largest sports federation, planning to use Coachbetter to serve as the central digital platform for all grassroots football clubs in Germany! Well done, Patrick Patzig and team!

Read the full “Why we invested in Coachbetter” writeup from our Principal Isabella Vahdati here:

Why we Invested

Lynx Educate launched in Malta

Congratulations to Lynx Educate, the social impact platform helping companies invest in education to drive social mobility for the communities they serve, on their Malta subsidiary launch.

🔵 INSIGHTS

Sidekick FM - The [New] Brighteye podcast

Every week, Rhys and David distils a few practical lessons from the founders and operators building the future of learning and work, so you - as founders - can apply it to your own company.

More than 40 episodes published and already listened to by hundreds of founders across Europe.

Listen to the latest episode:

Shakers: The lean European expansion playbook (4 Lessons)

How Shakers expanded from Spain into Portugal, Italy, the UK and France without following the traditional playbook, and the four lessons every founder should know before entering a new market.

** Listen Now **

A few more selected episodes:

• Marines → Army → Police: Build the team your stage demands
  Why the team that gets you from 0 to 1 probably isn’t the team that gets you from 10 to 100.
  ** Listen Now **

• Taste is the new AI moat
  Why taste, judgment and brand are becoming the real competitive advantage in AI.
  ** Listen Now **

• Secondaries as retention & Why Brighteye invested in Gyver.

  How secondary sales can help retain top talent, plus the thinking behind our investment in Gyver.
  ** Listen Now **

If you enjoy the conversations, subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or YouTube. And if there’s a founder or topic you’d like us to cover, simply hit reply. We’d love to hear your ideas.

—

New blog on Kids’ YouTuber dreams

We don’t scoff when kids say they want to be footballers or astronauts, despite the chances of achieving those aspirations being slim.

So why do we do it when kids say they want to be YouTubers?

In the blog “Why kids saying they want to be YouTubers when they grow up isn’t necessarily a bad thing,” published last week on our Sidekick content and resources platform, Rhys, our Head of Platform and Research, dove into this topic. He talks about the downsides, too, of course - but try to give a balanced view, including some commentary on the role AI is playing within the creator ecosystem.

Full blog here!

🔵 EVENTS

Coming up…

Founder Studio Demo Day - 15 July

After a total of 12 weeks of working hard, making connections and joining sessions in our Founder Studio curated programme - it’s time to pitch!

​On Wednesday 15 July we are excited to give the stage to our talented early-stage Founders building in the learning & work space. ​We’re filling the room in Central London with investors, founders, enterprise customers and the wider community for an afternoon of sharp pitches, bold ideas and great conversations. Want to hear and see the Demo Day performances?

Register interest here!

Hosted by our Founders

The excellent cohort of early-stage learning and work builders are not just working hard and supporting each other on our ground floor – they are hosting their own events in the Studio, too!

First out, Asan Kurmanguzhin, who is exploring how universities should evolve in the age of AI, with a particular focus on employability, practitioner-led learning and stronger bridges between students and the world of work, is running a 2-day in-person Finance Career Access Sprint on 4-5 July.
Who’s invited?
Ambitious Year 1–3 BSc and MSc students from any degree background who want to kick-start their careers in finance, investing, consulting, fintech, technology or startups. Meet experienced practitioners with backgrounds from J.P. Morgan, Heathrow Airport, McKinsey & Company, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), DoorDash, Deliveroo and more, work in teams on a practical finance case, receive live feedback, and build a clearer strategy for internships, career choices and long-term professional growth. More details here!

Later in July on Wednesday 22, Jenny Guo and Shawak Sharma at Lanura, the adaptive intelligence layer for workforce performance, are bringing together GTM professionals to practice sales scenarios, get live coaching from experts and network in a relaxed setting. Not your standard panel or theory-heavy workshop - it will be a practical and interactive event. Apply via the Luma page here!

Already happened…

Amsterdam Founder + Investor Breakfast

Last week, we partnered with Dutch Edtech, Rubio and Peak on a Founder + Investor Breakfast. A short panel and productive time to meet and mingle with founders and investors in the local learning & work community!

London Edtech Week Opening

A massive thanks to all who joined us and co-hosts Cooley LLP to celebrate the Opening of London EdTech Week 2026. Full house in Shoreditch, great to see so many friends in the community to kick off a week of activities focused around building and growing in learning & work tech!

SHINE morning coffee

Even before the Opening Reception, in the same morning, we had the pleasure of hosting a wonderful group of women in the learning and work community for a SHINE - Shaping Her Impact - coffee in Notting Hill. We couldn’t think of a better way to start it the week of events than this!

Building a Learning & Work community in Berlin

We spent a wonderful abend in Berlin in early June – planting early seeds of what we hope will grow into a vibrant learning and work tech community in this region.

Teaming up with our investor friends at Revent and Founder (Studio) friends at OGIMA we co-hosted an evening of content and conversations centred around building and funding and M&A in the world of learning and work technology. From the stage at hubraum – the entrepreneurship hub of Deutsche Telekom, we heard from AMBOSS Co-Founder Dr. Sievert Weiss, Otto Birnbaum, Founding Partner at Revent, Ali Alam, Venture Builder ESMT Berlin & Venture Partner at Earlybird Venture Capital and our own Founding Partner Benoit Wirz – moderated by Bengi Cos at OGIMA. Huge thanks to all who joined us in such a busy SuperReturn week!!

An evening with the Raspberry Pi Foundation

The latest in our Product For Learning Meetup series, co-hosted with Matt Walton, zoomed in on the timely topic of building responsible products for children. We were thrilled to welcome Laura Kirsop, the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s Chief Product and Technology Officer, for a fireside chat to spark conversation in Notting Hill.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a global charity democratising access to Computer Science education. Laura’s team builds the platforms and tools used by millions of children and educators globally.

​Laura shared insights from the coalface of designing safe, responsible products for young people, and why the RPF’s mission-driven model creates both a responsibility and a genuine opportunity to do things differently.

Our 20+ attendees were also, as always, put to work in groups, and we all enjoyed some great conversations and connections across the evening.

We hope you are doing well!

Our Founder Studio has got off to a flying start, we are extremely impressed with all 14 hard-working teams that are part of this programme. Check out our intro videos recorded just as we were kicking off a bit over 3 weeks ago at the bottom of this update to learn more about each founding team!

We’re also very happy to have welcomed two new companies to our portfolio family, leading rounds in Italy-based Gyver and UK-based NEX Health Intelligence.

And, who knows, maybe we’ll get some of the Founder Studio startups joining our main portfolio in the (near) future, too?

This update includes:

• Investment Updates – Welcome to Gyver and NEX

• Insights - Rethinking neurodivergence in K12 and Higher Education

• Events – Berlin Learning & Work community evening

• Selected News from the Portfolio – Shakers on Sifted Leaderboard

• Founder Studio Intros - Meet the teams

And more! We hope you’ll enjoy!

Best,
The Brighteye Team

🔵 INVESTMENT UPDATES

New Investment - Gyver - €1.4M

We are happy to share that we have joined the Gyver journey – as Francesco Paolo Defendi, Leo Acciarri & Mattia Zarrelli and team are building the workforce infrastructure for Europe's new industrial era, starting with electricians. We led the Italian startup’s recent €1.4M pre-seed round, with participation from āltitude, Vento, Zanichelli Venture and existing investor Antler, alongside several angel investors.

We were immediately impressed with team Gyver’s understanding of how electrification of transport, factories, grids and buildings is creating massive demand for skilled electrical workers - Europe will need an estimated 5.8M additional skilled blue-collar workers by 2030 - and how to address this, by building a conversational hiring platform designed around how electricians already communicate and find work. Workers interact primarily through WhatsApp, answering structured prompts around experience, certifications, salary expectations and availability, while employers receive enriched and highly qualified candidate profiles.

Our Partner David Guérin has shared more on why we are so excited about what Francesco, Leo and Mattia are building at Gyver, their speed of execution and their ambition - check out his write-up and video here - and hear Francesco, David and Rhys discuss it on the Sidekick FM podcast here!

New investment – NEX Health Intelligence - €1M

We are made up to share our latest investment – leading a €1M pre-seed round in UK-based NEX Health Intelligence. Founders Ashleigh Myall, PhD and Chang Ho Yoon MD PhD and team are building an always-on infection intelligence platform that uses AI to help hospitals detect, predict, and prevent highly resistant infections before they spread.
Our Principal Isabella Vahdati said: ❝AI has the potential to enable intelligent decision support in high-stakes environments, enabling healthcare teams to act faster and allocate resources smarter, fundamentally transforming how clinical teams work.❞

Adeline Arts and Science, AFI Ventures (Ventech’s impact fund), MOMENTOUS., the Conception X Angel Syndicate, and industry Angels also took part in the recent round.

Check out our full “Why we invested” here!

Reinvestment - Coachbetter - $8.2M

It’s a joy to share that our portfolio company Coachbetter, the operating system for football clubs, have secured $8.2M in a Pre-Series A funding round. We’re excited to have doubled down to continue backing Patrick Patzig and the team, as they keep building the platform for the people who actually run ⚽ football week to week – the volunteers, the coaches, the clubs. Coachbetter means less time on admin, more time for community and football.
In this round Coachbetter were also backed again by Swiss Founders Fund and ZEN 11 Holding GmbH, as well as recent La Liga-winning coach Hansi
Flick, alongside football people like Paul Lambert and Julian Draxler - plus a strategic new investor, to be shared soon 👀.

Well done, team – onwards!

🔵 INSIGHTS

New blog: Rethinking neurodivergence in K12 and Higher Education

What are the main challenges in how we support accessibility and varied neurodivergence within K12 and HE environments? Where are the opportunities for startups in these spaces?
In this recent blog, Rhys Spence, our Head of Platform and Research, runs through some of the main challenges in this area, as well as exploring what can be done to improve the way diagnoses are made and treatment is provided.

Read the full blog here

🔵 EVENTS

Coming Up…

Learning & Work Community Meetup Berlin

We are heading to Berlin on 10 June, where we have teamed up with our friends at Revent and Ogima Co-Founder Bengi Cos to co-host an evening focused around funding and M&A in the learning & work space. Join us to meet investors and fellow founders for great content, conversations, light food and drinks.

Register your interest now!

Already happened…

Legal Literacy for Founders

Last week we enjoyed our second Legal Literacy for Founders evening in London together global legal law firm CMS – thanks for hosting at your lovely office!

Sam Pout, Partner at CMS UK, gave an update on UK Startup Funding trends, and Sam Fisher, Associate, covered IP Ownerships Essentials, Trademark Strategy and NDAs & Confidentiality, before Brighteye’s Founding Partner Benoit Wirz took us through Cap Table and Ownership Basics from the investor perspective.

A LOT of important information to remember and consider for any Founder, from the start – thanks to all who joined us!

🔵 SELECTED NEWS FROM THE PORTFOLIO

Shakers on the Sifted Southern Europe Leaderboard

It’s great to see Shakers as number 25 on the annual Sifted 100 ranking of the fastest-growing startups in Southern Europe – based on revenue growth over the past three years. We are proud to back the team as they are building the “home of freeworking,” a platform where companies and the best freelance talent build and work together successfully, powered by AI.

🔵 FOUNDER STUDIO INTROS

As we kicked off our Founder Studio programme at the end of April, we got the Founders taking part to share short videos to introduce what they are building and what they are looking to achieve during the 12-week residency with us. Check them all out here to learn more:

This month, we are super excited and busy preparing to welcome a group of promising learning & work startups to our Brighteye Founder Studio. The selection job was hard, having received well over 100 impressive applications. We did it and we can’t wait to get started in our London office on Monday 27 April. We will be sharing more about the Founders and their companies over the 12 weeks of our programme, through loads of updates on social media – so be sure to follow us on LinkedIn.

This update also covers:

• Investment Update - Wikifarmer announces $7.7M round

• Insights – Blog on Using AI to fix the Big Challenges

• Events – Legal Literacy for Founders event in London

• Selected News from the Portfolio – Oneday on 100 UK startups to watch list

And more, we hope you’ll enjoy!!

Best,
The Brighteye Team

🔵 INVESTMENT UPDATE

Wikifarmer announces $7.7M round

We are excited to share our Wikifarmer investment, in a $7.7M round that we co-led alongside Piraeus Bank, with participation from existing investors Point Nine Capital Fund III GmbH & Co KG, Metavallon VC and Inveready, and new value-add partners: sequel, Climate Club and Satgana.

Great to see Ilias Sousis, Petros Sagkos and the team taking the Athens-based B2B AgTech startup using AI to connect food businesses directly with producers across 45+ countries to the next level, evolving from the “Wikipedia of Farming” (a free agricultural knowledge library used by over 12 million visitors in 17 languages) into the operating system for agricultural trade, and introducing FarmClick: a joint venture with Piraeus Bank to digitise the agricultural inputs market - covering seeds, fertilisers, crop protection, equipment, and advisory services across Greece.

We’re so happy to be on this journey with team Wikifarmer, based on the unique position the company holds at the intersection of agricultural education and commercial infrastructure. Brighteye’s David Guérin, Partner, and Isabella Vahdati, Principal said:
❝Agriculture remains one of the most fragmented and intermediary-heavy sectors globally, with margin lost across layers of complexity. Wikifarmer’s ability to use education as a catalyst for commercial transactions is distinctive. The team is removing friction, restoring margin on both sides of the marketplace, and equipping farmers with the knowledge to operate more profitably. They have created a high-trust environment where knowledge drives trade. Combined with an AI-driven approach to automating the supply chain, we believe Wikifarmer has the potential to become foundational trade infrastructure for agricultural commerce. We are confident in their vision of a smarter, more transparent food supply chain where education drives trust and trade.❞

Read our full “Why we Invested” here!

Thanks also to Tech Funding News, EU-Startups and Tech.eu for covering the news!

🔵 INSIGHTS

New blog: Fix the pothole!

How can we use AI to rethink and fix, not avoid, deep and complex societal challenges? To not just improve workflows, but to eliminate the ones we don’t need?

Big questions addressed by Rhys Spence, our Head of Platform & Research, in a recent blog published on the Brighteye Sidekick!

Improvements in workflows can add a lot of value and drive efficiency. But many impressive new products automate what we have, as opposed to rethink if the processes need to exist in the first place. How can AI help us fix the much deeper, fundamental challenges at the cause – including climate, quality education, aging population, healthcare - Rhys asks, using the pothole analogy to illustrate how it is often easier to patch up, or drive around a pothole, rather than fix it altogether!

Full Blog Here!

Rhys and Sidekick FM host David Guérin also explore this further in this podcast episode.

Listen to the Podcast!

PMF Guest Blog: AI Disruption

A framework for thinking strategically about the opportunities and threats that AI is creating for teams building in learning is what Matt Walton, Learning Product Leader & Coach, is providing in this third guest blog for our Brighteye Sidekick content hub.

The rules of product-market fit still apply. Check out the full post to see Matt revisiting the four dimensions he introduced in his first Blog in this series (link below) - with updated headlines and isights in response to how to AI is changing the game and the speed at which it is played:

Dimension 1: Aspirational ➡ Changing Aspirations
Dimension 2: Effective ➡ Evolving expectations
Dimension 3: Viable ➡ Disrupted discovery and perceptions of value
Dimension 4: Possible ➡ Emerging possibilities

The updated approaches all come with case studies from companies Makers, Oak National Academy, Novakid Inc and IU International University of Applied Sciences, showing what a successful strategic response to this disruption looks like.

A lot of useful information and advice, indeed!

Read the Full Post here!

Matt has also written 2 previous Guest Blogs:

🧩 PMF Dimensions
🧩 PMF Stages

And, see below for details on the Product for Learning Evening we are hosting with Matt in London next week.

🔵 EVENTS

Coming up…

Product for Learning with the Raspberry Pi Foundation

Final call for next week’s Product for Learning meetup in London, on Tuesday 21 April, where the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s Laura Kirsop will be sharing her thought on building responsible tech for children.

Laura, in conversation with coach and fractional Edtech product leader Matt Walton, will be giving her take on questions including:

• What does it actually mean to design with learning and wellbeing, not just engagement, in mind?

• How do you build principled frameworks for safety, data, and responsible design without reinventing the wheel?

• What happens when you co-design with children? (Spoiler: they’ll surprise you every time.)

There will be the usual opportunity to get to know others building new learning products in breakout discussions.

We’ve got a handful of places left so if you want to come along get in quick!

Sign up here!

Legal Literacy for Founders

We have once again teamed up with the team at global law firm CMS to host an evening of practical legal matters. Register your interest now to join us for a session that turns legal jargon into practical moves you can use tomorrow, as well as pizza, beers and great conversations in London on Tuesday 12 May.

Register Interest to join here!

London Edtech Week Opening Reception

​In what is becoming tradition, Cooley and Brighteye are excited to welcome the learning & work community to the London Edtech Week Official Opening Reception on June. Kick the week off with excellent conversations, light food and drinks in the (hopefully) Shoreditch sunshine on Monday 15 June.

Register Interest Now!

Already happened…

Crazy days at ASU+GSV Summit

This week we have been enjoying San Diego and the ASU+GSV Summit – alongside a LOT of the global Learning & Work community.
Rhys was on a panel on Monday - “Exit Velocity: What Makes EdTech Companies Acquisition-Ready” – and there were so many meetings and side events and catch-ups for Ben on Rhys, keeping them busy for the duration.

Tower Founders’ visit recap

We had the pleasure of hosting a ground floor full of members of the Tower - Hub & Community for Startup Founders a couple of weeks back!

Thanks for coming to our London office and letting our Founding Partner Benoit Wirz and Head of Platform & Events Rhys Spence talk about what we do at Brighteye and share details of the upcoming Founder Studio. Excellent questions for the AMA with Ben and great conversations all around, what a perfect way to do lunch!

🔵 SELECTED NEWS FROM THE PORTFOLIO

Oneday on 100 UK Startups to Watch list

Well done to our portco Oneday for securing a spot on the Entrepreneur UK’s 100 UK Startups to Watch list for 2026 (on p 86-87).Oneday helps aspiring entrepreneurs launch real businesses by combining accredited education, AI-powered tools, and 1:1 mentorship. The platform is rapidly gaining traction and redefining early-stage entrepreneurship in the UK. Congrats, Ranbir, Taras & team!

La Solive an Impact 120 winner and Founder awarded National Order of Merit

Great to learn that La Solive, one of our French portcos, is an Impact 120 winner! Each year, the Impact France Movement selects the most promising startups that make their social or environmental mission their growth engine. The list includes 120 French companies that prove, each in their own way, that it is possible to build an economy that is both efficient and committed! For La Solive, this recognition comes at a time when the issue of energy transition has never been more central – well done, team.

It was also great to be invited along to the ceremony as La Solive Founder and CEO Ariane Komorn was awarded the French National Order of Merit for her contributions to and achievements for the country – you make us proud!

We hope you are doing well!

Who wants to “move in” with us at the Brighteye London office this spring? If you, or someone you know, are a hungry, ambitious early-stage founder ready to build or already building something category-defining in learning and work, we’d like to hear from you!

Why? We are introducing the Brighteye Founder Studio. Starting in late April, we are inviting a small, carefully selected cohort of very early-stage tech founders to join us for a curated, intensive 12-week programme. More details and link to apply below!

In addition, this month’s update includes:

• Selected News from the Portfolio – Sdui Group becomes Seven Education

• Insights – How to Sell your Company, an Exit playbook for Founders

• Events – Product For Learning Meetup with Laura Kirsop at Raspberry Pi Foundation

Please enjoy, and have a great Thursday!

Best,
The Brighteye Team

🔵 FOUNDER STUDIO

Calling all early-stage Learning & Work Founders!!

Starting in April 2026, team Brighteye are inviting a small, carefully selected cohort of very early-stage tech founders to join us at our Founders Studio in Notting Hill for a 12-week programme focused on securing design partners and pilots.

You’ll:
🔸 Connect with other ambitious founders addressing some of the most interesting challenges and opportunities in learning and work
🔸 Tap into hands-on startup support from the Brighteye team, mentors and other experts as you’re building
🔸 Get support on reaching potential clients and enterprise pilots, through direct connections and demo days with corporate partners
🔸 Work from our ground-floor office space

The goal is for you to leave the residency with these partners and pilots sorted, equipped with fundraising guidance to help you take your company to the next level when the time is right.

Who should apply?
🔹Very early stage founders - MVP built and tested
🔹 Building in the future of learning and work
🔹 Small team - 1-3 people
🔹 Based in or able to be in London 2+ days per week

All the details and the form to register interest is right here:

🔵 SELECTED NEWS FROM THE PORTFOLIO

Sdui Group becomes Seven Education

Big news from The Sdui Group, the market leader among European education technology platforms, which is now operating under the name Seven Education. With this rebranding, our portfolio company brings together its group of education brands under a shared identity and creating a clear framework for an integrated, constantly expanding portfolio of digital solutions for everyday education.

Over the past few years, the solutions Sdui, Additio App, PUPIL, FoxEducation and Educamos have grown into an international group of companies. Most recently, Digital Learning GmbH, a leading provider of education and administration solutions in Germany, and its affiliated company Digital Services 42 GmbH, an expert in hosting infrastructure and managed services, has been welcomed to the group.

With Seven Education, the vision, values and strengths are merged into an integrated platform, covering all key areas: School communication, class management, digital lesson planning, school administration and AI features. The solutions make processes more effective, collaboration easier, and foster individual growth – with one clear goal: To give teachers time and space for what really matters!

Podcast alert!

To learn more, tune in to hear CEO and Founder Daniel Zacharias on the latest episode of the Startup Spotlight Podcast (in German), covering:
🔹 the reasons behind the rebranding
🔹 the investment round with Bain Capital
🔹 the vision of an Education OS for all of Europe

Zen Educate on FT1000: Europe’s Fastest-Growing Companies 2026

Congrats to team Zen Educate, who with an absolute growth rate of 752.1, grabs the #126 spot on The FT1000 Europe’s Fastest-Growing Companies 2026. Compiled with research company Statista, the FT lists the European companies that achieved the highest compound annual growth rate in revenue between 2021 and 2024. The 2026 edition is the tenth annual list showcases 1,000 examples of outstanding business performance. Well done, Zen!

🔵 INSIGHTS

How to Sell Your Company - our recent paper on Exits

Most founders don’t start a company planning to sell it. They start to build something valuable, fix a problem, or prove a point. But exits don’t simply happen; they are built.

Exploring the Exit landscape, we published the “How To Sell Your Company” report, a detailed paper bringing together insights covering everything from preparation to paperwork, from choosing advisors to managing your team post-exit, from your shared visions to your valuations.

The best outcomes - financially, strategically, and emotionally - tend to belong to founders who were exit-ready long before a formal process began.​

🔗 Head to Sidekick for a two-page summary and link to the full paper here!

It covers:

• A look at the headline data

• The playbook that all founders can use in their exits process

• A selection of case studies

Thanks to all the bankers, lawyers, founders and acquirers for your great contributions to helping us address the opaque and under-covered subject of Exits!

Europe’s skills gap – the missing layer

Europe has world-class universities, a large diaspora of internationally mobile workers, and structural demand across every major sector. What it lacks is the infrastructure to convert that potential into organised talent flows.

In our new report “The missing layer in Europe’s workforce infrastructure” published today, Brighteye Partner David Guérin is exploring how companies rethink how talent moves across borders and leveraging the strategic “talent importation” lever.

We share our thinking on:
🔸 Why we believe this space matters now
🔸 Our understanding of four broad categories we see shaping the early landscape – a market map with observations
🔸 Where we believe the largest opportunities may lie

We believe that whoever connects skills creation to mobility infrastructure in a structured way will own a significant share of the labour supply chain for Europe’s most acute shortages. Founders building in immigration infrastructure, full-stack mobility or sector-specific migration rails - not just workflow tools - let’s talk (dg@brighteyevc.com)!

Read the full blog post here!

We’re on the Pathfounders Podcast

After the publication of our European Learning & Work Funding Report 2026 in January, we were thrilled when Mike Butcher ✍️, Founder and Editor at Pathfounders, invited Rhys Spence, our Head of Platform & Research, to join him to talk about it on the podcast. We really enjoyed the conversation, unpacking some of the results, trends and changes we cover in the report.

Listen in here!

Still not explored the full report?
It’s live on our Brighteye Sidekick Resource hub here!

🔵 EVENTS

Coming up…

South Summit Scaleup Series Paris – we’re on stage tonight

The Brighteye family will be represented on two panels this evening, as team South Summit arrives in Paris 🇫🇷 with their Scaleup Series, connecting European leaders in the scaleup ecosystem.

Samir Tahraoui, CEO & Co-Founder at our portfolio company LabLabee, will be on the “From Paris to the World, and back again” founder panel, alongside Juan José Güemes of IE University and Amine Raji at Spore.Bio.
On the “Investing in growth: Unlocking opportunities” investor panel, our Partner David Guérin will be speaking alongside Cédric Voigt of Ballou, Bruno Delahaye at Cathay Innovation and Samantha J. at Elaia.

All set for an excellent evening of great conversations!

Product for Learning with the Raspberry Pi Foundation

In the next Product For Learning Meetup in London, on Tuesday 21 April, we will focus on the timely topic of building responsible products for children, with Laura Kirsop, the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s Chief Product and Technology Officer, joining for a fireside chat and spark conversation.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a global charity democratising access to Computer Science education. Laura’s team builds the platforms and tools used by millions of children and educators globally. She’ll be sharing insights from the coalface of designing safe, responsible products for young people, and why RPF’s mission-driven model creates both a responsibility and a genuine opportunity to do things differently.

​Laura will give her take on questions including:

• ​What does it actually mean to design with learning and wellbeing, not just engagement, in mind?

• ​How do you build principled frameworks for safety, data, and responsible design without reinventing the wheel?

• ​What happens when you co-design with children? (Spoiler: they’ll surprise you every time.)

• ​How to navigate the heavy lift of regulation, particularly when expanding into the US.

• ​Why is so much technology still not designed with young people’s interests at heart, and what can we do about it?

​There will be the usual opportunity to get to know others building new learning products in breakout discussions. The evening will be compared by Matt Walton, coach and fractional Edtech product leader.

Details and Registration of interest

​

Matt has also recently penned two Guest Blogs on Product Market Fit for our Brighteye Sidekick resource hub.

The first looks at the 4 Dimensions that you need to consider to be able to create a successful learning product:
🧩 Read the full Dimensions blog here

The second looks at the Stages you need to work through to successfully find true PMF, from pre to mature:
🧩 Read the full Stages blog here

Already happened…

Exits Evening Recap

We got a lovely crowd of founders, investors and operators together in London a few weeks back, to talk about the opaque and under-covered subject of exits.

Teaming up with leading global investment bank Houlihan Lokey and top global executive search firm Erevena, we hosted an evening full of insights, conversations and networking.

Our Head of Platform & Research, Rhys Spence, kicked off with sharing key findings from our big paper “How to sell your company” – an exit playbook for founders, which was published last week (details above).

To dig into the details and real life experience, we were happy to be joined by:
🎤 Sophie Glanfield- Investment team atTenzing
🎤 James Weatherill- CEO atArbor Education(acquired byPermira
🎤 James Local- Managing Director atHoulihan Lokey
🎤 Benoit Wirz- Founding Partner at Brighteye (moderator)

So, what’s new at Brighteye since our last update? A lot! We are super happy to have launched our very new branding and visual profile. You may already have noticed our new look, logo and website?

The first publication that went live in the updated look was the European Learning & Work Funding Report 2026. And next week we will be sharing another report – “How to sell your Company,” focused on the opaque and under-covered subject of exits. It’s full of hands-on insights from bankers, lawyers, founders and acquirers. Register here to be sure you get it directly in your inbox as soon as it’s out!

And, if you are in London on Wednesday 25 February, we hope to see you at the in-person launch event. All details in Events below.

Please enjoy our updates below, including:

• Insights – Podcast: Funding Report Beyond the Charts

• Events – Legal Literacy for Founders Session in London in March

Happy Wednesday!

Best,
The Brighteye Team

🔵 INSIGHTS

The European Learning & Work Funding Report 2026

Our latest annual European Learning & Work Funding Report was published at the end of January.

Some headlines:

• Total € Invested: €1.6Bn – more than doubled between 2024 and 2025

• Deal count: 334 - up 21% on 2024 levels

• Five markets - the UK, Germany, France, Spain and the Netherlands - accounted for over 80% of European deals

• The most active global investor in learning & work is Y Combinator. General Catalyst, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Sequoia Capital also feature in the top 10!

• The largest European deals were raised by AMBOSS with €240M (GER), Lingokids with €103M (SP), and Brighteye’s portfolio company Sdui with €95M (GER)

We also dove into two updated taxonomies for understanding the space. The first looks at data between Conventional Edtech (K12, HE, lifelong learning), Corporate and workplace learning, and Productivity and talent platforms. The second considers a forward-facing ‘value chain for learning & work’ which we believe represents a framework that applies to all sectors.

Big shoutout on the impressive and hard work to our Head of Platform & Research Rhys for pulling all the data and content together, and our Designer in Residence James for making sure it is beautifully presented.

Full Story and Report here

Sidekick Podcast: Beyond the Numbers

The Funding report was also featured in the Sidekick FM Podcast. In this episode, host David Guérin and report author Rhys Spence goes beyond the charts and talk through what’s really happening.

They chat about:
- What pattern stood out in this year’s data
- What the data actually says about where learning creates value today
- The big structural shift founders should understand from this report
- What founders are still misreading or underestimating about how much the market has already changed

You want to check this one out - click the image to listen in:

AI Training set for the mainstream

In the latest follow-up from the European Learning & Work Funding Report, our Founding Partner Benoit Wirz wrote an article diving deeper into one of the featured 2026 predictions: that AI training would become a major focus in 2026.

That shift is clearly already underway.

In the report we argued that AI skills were moving from something informal and optional to something more structured and systemic. AI skills can no longer be treated as provisional, something to pick up informally, learn on the job, or outsource to the motivated few. This article expands on that thinking and explores what’s driving the change.

Some of the themes covered:

• AI training is becoming a shared, organisational and societal responsibility

• Early, tool-centric approaches to AI learning are proving insufficient

• Foundational AI capabilities are becoming clearer and more standardised

• Governments are beginning to frame AI fluency as a form of public infrastructure

• The real value is moving toward applying AI effectively within real workflows

The core argument is simple: AI training is shifting from experimentation towards intentional design. The questions now are: i) who will shape it? And ii) how will it be implemented?

Find the Full Article here

🔵 EVENTS

Coming up…

London Event: “How to Sell your Company” – New Report launch

Join us in London next week for the Launch of “How to Sell your Company” – a new report on Exits!

​With great contributions from bankers, lawyers, founders and acquirers, the new report addresses the opaque and under-covered subject of exits. It includes headline data, case studies, and a playbook for founders to use when preparing their own exits.

We are excited to have teamed up with leading global investment bank Houlihan Lokey and top global executive search firm Erevena to host an evening of insights, conversations and networking on Wednesday 25 February.
​
What to expect at the event?

• Presentation of the Report results, by author Rhys Spence, Head of Platform & Research, Brighteye

• ​Panel conversation with James Weatherill, Founder at Arbor Education (Acquired by Permira) and James Local, Managing Director at Houlihan Lokey - moderated by Benoit Wirz, Founding Partner at Brighteye

• Networking
  

​When: Wednesday 25 February 2026 from 5pm
Where: Central London
🔗 Register interest here, now

Legal Literacy for Founders - Session 2

We have a new Legal Literacy for Founders evening scheduled – save the date to join us in London on Tuesday 10 March 2026. It’s great to be planning a second Session in this series together with our partners at CMS. We will explore a number of critical topics, including hiring domestically and internationally and protecting your IP!

Register interest to join here!

And, ICYM the write-up from the first session, it is live on Brighteye Sidekick: Startup Legals – Setting up for Success

Looking back…

Techarena Stage Moment

Our Principal Isabella Vahdati enjoyed taking to the “Bright Stage” in front of a great crowd at TECHARENA in Stockholm on Thursday, 12 February, for her presentation ❝The Future Workplace – What Jobs Will Our Kids Have?❞

Photo credit: Camilla Svensk, Techarena

Product for Learning Meetup

It’s become a regular feature, our Product for Learning Evenings with Matt Walton in Notting Hill. At the latest one, we got 25 Product people together to hear from Toby Mather, Founder of Lingumi & Product Director at Novakid Inc, Europe’s biggest online English teaching platform for kids (who acquired Lingumi in late 2024).

The format of the Meetup: Short talk - small group discussions on real product problems - group share-back with speaker’s feedback – thanks for sharing, all!

VC Comms Brekkie in Notting Hill

We loved partnering with Marie Ch. Fabiunke of Cosmyc Partners on co-hosting a communications people breakfast at our London office, topped with getting the inner secrets of how to catch the attention of journalists from Sifted’s Freya Pratty!

Busy Bett week in London

The Bett Global-week was a big one! Sharing a few shots from some of the events we were hosting and involved it and enjoyed a lot!

Co-hosting an Education, Health & Climate investor Breakfast, alongside Serena

Co-Hosting our traditional Mixer alongside Campbell Lutyens, Educapital & Owl Ventures

Hosting a delegation of Polish startups traveling with Polska Agencja Rozwoju Przedsiębiorczości (PARP) at our office

Presenting our European Learning & Work Funding Report 2026 Sneak Peek at the Innovation Theatre at the actual Bett Event

Welcome to this Special Update, brought to you today as we proudly have just published our Brighteye European Learning & Work Funding Report 2026!

Please find a collection of key findings below, and head to our Brighteye Sidekick resource hub for a summary of the takeaways and to download the full report!

We hope you’ll enjoy!

Best,
Team Brighteye

Some key findings

Highlights include that VC funding secured by European Learning & Work companies more than doubled from 2024 to 2025 and the number of deals jumped 21%. Global funding also increased but less significantly than in Europe.

Geographically, activity is concentrated in five core markets - the UK, Germany, France, Spain, and the Netherlands - yet the ecosystem is city-led, with London, Paris, Berlin, and Madrid acting as primary hubs and a second tier of European cities – Milan, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Dublin - emerging with distinct specialisations.

Capital remains concentrated, with a small number of large rounds driving headline totals, with ~55% of capital concentrated in the top 10 deals, even as deal volume stays resilient. The top deals were raised by German Amboss with €240M, Spanish Lingokids with €103M, and German Sdui with €95M (a Brighyeye portfolio company!).

On the Exits, they tended to be driven by strategic buyers rather than PE, with the biggest deal being Swedish Sana acquired by US HR Platform Workday for ~$1.1BN. Companies seeking exits should position themselves as strategically unavoidable, rather than purely financially optimised.

The Value Chain for Learning & Work

While conventional Edtech funding levels remain below the peaks we observed in 2021, we see that innovation and capital are increasingly converging around a broader learning & work stack, extending beyond education delivery into skills activation, productivity, hiring, and mobility.

Hence, this 7^th edition of the report has become the ‘Learning & Work’ funding report.

To this end, within this year’s report and in addition to the headline funding and activity data, we consider two different ways to understand the Learning & Work space:

• The first looks at data between Conventional Edtech (K12, HE, lifelong learning), Corporate and workplace learning, and Productivity and talent platforms.

• The second considers a forward-facing ‘value chain for learning & work’ which we believe represents a framework that applies to all sectors - working through ‘learn’ (foundational knowledge), ‘place’ (contextualising skills within work), ‘perform’ (on-the-job effectiveness, productivity) and progress (career mapping, upskilling and skill portability). This is more focused on the ‘purpose’ of specific solutions rather than their user base.

The data points to a clear reframing: learning is increasingly funded not as an end in itself, but as a driver of work outcomes and progression over time. It explores how the shift from education delivery to labour market outcomes is reshaping the European ecosystem and what it means for founders, investors, and ecosystem players looking ahead.

You will find much more in the summary blog post and full report on our Brighteye Sidekick website.

➡️ Summary Blog and Full Report Here ⬅️

☀️ Happy 2026!

Last year is behind us, with all its ups and downs. We will get back with a deep dive into some of those in our annual 💶 European Learning & Work Funding Report that we are preparing to launch in the next couple of weeks 👀. Halfway through January, we are gearing up for an intense few days of activities during the Bett conference in London next week, to be followed by some big and exciting changes 💎 on our side – stay tuned!

For now, a short update on activities, including:

• Insights – Get ready for the European Learning & Work Funding Report 2026

• Events – Product For Learning London Meetup

• Selected News from the Portfolio – LabLabee joins NVIDIA’s Inception Program

Thanks for reading!

Best,
The Brighteye Team

🔎 INSIGHTS

💶 New Year – New European Funding Report
Our annual European Learning & Work Funding Report is in the making - launching at 📣 the end of January!!

What to expect from the Report?
📍 2025 in numbers - Funding and Deals overview
📍 Reframing Edtech - from Education to Learning & Work
📍 Growth, Funding & Ecosystem Trends
📍 Regional Nuances
📍 Exits and Signals from Investors
📍 Our Predictions for 2026

Want to be among the first to get the report in your 📬 inbox?

✒️ Register here! 🖊️

🧠 AI Companions & Cognitive Effects
How will AI companions understand us, not just serve us?

After publishing our report “Me, Myself, and My AI: The Rise of AI Companions,” we were excited to read US fund Forerunner’s “From Network Effects to Cognitive Effects” shortly after.

The core argument in our thesis is that AI is moving beyond assistants and tools toward companions: systems that actively engage, motivate, and help change behaviour. Kirsten Green’s lens 🔍 for Forerunner frames cognitive effects as the next great source of product defensibility - a successor to network effects and scale. Instead of a value that increases with more users (a classic network effect), cognitive effects accrue per user, based on how much a product understands someone’s unique context and pattern. Products with strong cognitive effects don’t just get hard to leave because of inertia; they become meaningfully woven into how people think and act.

So, we agree that companions embody cognitive effects. While we zone in on what these companions are and how they might play out across verticals like health, finance, and education, Forerunner articulates the macro-dynamic that makes this approach foundational to how software will win in the 2025–2035 decade.

❓Want to learn more❓

🔎 Find both posts here 🔍

🎪 EVENTS

🎈 Our Annual Bett-week Mixer
We can’t wait to host another London Edtech Mixer 🇬🇧 during Bett next week, alongside Owl Ventures, Educapital and Campbell Lutyens, on Wednesday 21 January. For the third time, we are bringing together investors, founders, and operators from across the Learning & Work community for an evening of focused conversations, drinks and light bites.

Space is limited, and following two (beyond) sold-out 🍭 editions, now is the time to register interest!

🔗 I'd like to join! 🔗

👀 Funding Report Sneak Peek at Bett
We are excited to have partnered with the team at Bett on presenting a sneak peek of the upcoming European Learning & Work Funding Report during the event at London’s ExCeL next week. Join us at the Innovation Theatre on Thursday 22 January to hear Rhys Spence, our Head of Platform & Research, and author of the Report, present a:

• Short, sharp topline data on global and European funding flows in 2025 vs previous years - including investment totals, biggest rounds, funding trends, most active investors, and more

• Brief call-out on market expansion beyond classic EdTech into skills, workplace learning, productivity. and “just-in-time” learning 

➡️ Details here ⬅️

🧩 Product for Learning Meetup with Toby Mather
In the first Product For Learning session of 2026, we are proud to partner with Matt Walton in welcoming Toby Mather, Product Director at Novakid (& exited founder of Lingumi) to share his journey with a selected group of learning change makers.

Join us in London on Wednesday 3 February, to hear Toby reflect on questions including:

• ​Will AI tutoring disrupt live tutoring companies?

• ​How do you even build an AI Tutor?

• ​What is good retention for an AI learning product?

• ​How do live tutoring companies adapt to the risk of disruption?

​There will also be breakout discussions to get to know others building new learning products. And 🍕 pizza!

🔗 Register now to secure your spot!

📣 SELECTED NEWS FROM THE PORTFOLIO

📹 The Final Festive Calendar Video
Every Sunday in December, we had the joy of sharing a video catch-up with some of our portfolio founders. For the final one, we sat down with Samir of LabLabee - on a mission to deliver powerful, practical AI solutions that help telco teams learn, test, and operate smarter - to hear some of the highlights ✨ of 2025 and what they are most excited about for in this new year.

🍿 Check out the video here 🍿

And ICYM the first three:

🎈Festive Calendar Week 1 – Gunnar Windsand Sem - installer.com
🎈Festive Calendar Week 2 – Jaime Castillo - Shakers
🎈Festive Calendar Week 3 – Eduardo Freire Rodrigues – UpHill Health

🏎️ AI-acceleration for LabLabee
Staying with LabLabee, we’re also proud to learn that the French portco, has been accepted into the NVIDIA Inception Program, supporting companies building the next generation of AI-driven innovation. Joining the program will allow access to cutting-edge AI infrastructure, developer tools, and expertise to accelerate the product roadmap and strengthen their AI capabilities for the telecom industry. Well done, team!

🇵🇹 UpHill at South Summit Scaleup Series Lisbon
UpHill Health Founder and CEO Eduardo Rodrigues is also among the speakers 🎤 as the South Summit arrives in Lisbon on their Scaleup Series tour in two weeks. Catch him and an impressive lineup of speakers exploring Growth Funding, Going Global and Powering the Ecosystem on 29 January!

We hope you’re all having a great December!

Before we give these laptops a little rest towards the end of December, we had a great Holiday Season day out in London with the team this week. It included ⛸️ ice skating, the Crystal Maze 💎 experience (shoutout to all the fans of the 90s TV show!), excellent food, company and a lot of laughs. We have shared some shots 📸 at the bottom, so please keep reading!

Our update includes:

• Selected News from the Portfolio – Check out our Festive Calendar Founder chats

• Insights – Product Collection now live on Sidekick

• Events – European Edtech Funding Report Launch at Bett London in January

All the best!
The Brighteye team ❄

📣 SELECTED NEWS FROM THE PORTFOLIO

🎁 Our Festive Season Calendar
Over the past few weeks, we have had fun speaking to a selection of our Portfolio companies, to get updates on their 2025 highlights and 2026 expectations for our Festive Season Calendar.

So far, we have heard from Gunnar Windsand Sem at Norwegian installer.com, Jaime Castillo at Spanish Shakers and Eduardo Freire Rodrigues at Portuguese UpHill Health. Links below, and stay tuned for the clip featuring LabLabee Founder and CEO Samir Tahraoui this coming Sunday!

🎈Festive Calendar Week 1 – Gunnar Windsand Sem - installer.com
🎈Festive Calendar Week 2 – Jaime Castillo - Shakers
🎈Festive Calendar Week 3 – Eduardo Freire Rodrigues – UpHill Health

🔎 INSIGHTS

🗂️ The Full Sidekick Content Collection on Product
In our latest addition to our ops Collections, we explore 🔍 the Product function. With excellent support from our ⭐️ Product mentors Jonathan Hey and Scott Eblen, we have just published 6 new articles, put together by our Head of Platform & Research Rhys Spence.

To help guide you when setting up a stellar Product function, discover insights on:
🔹 Building a Product Discipline: A Crucial Leap
🔹 What a good Product Strategy looks like (and who owns it)
🔹 How Engineering and Product should work together
🔹 Product Development Process: Shipping and Iteration in Startups
🔹 Balancing Speed and Quality in early Product Development
🔹 Using Data: Customer Insights and Finding Product-Market Fit

👉🏻 Find the Full Collection here 👈🏽

🩺 Who’s in charge of your health?
In a recent report (including a market map), we explored how consumers are becoming the CEOs of their own health.

For years, consumers were googling their symptoms and “wellness” was a feel-good category on the fringe of healthcare. Today, it’s evolving into a $2T+ global consumer health market behaving more like technology: fast product cycles, direct distribution, and real-time feedback loops from data → insight → action.

Two forces are colliding and reinforcing each other:
🔹 Empowered consumers who expect control, personalisation, and measurable outcomes.
🔹 Consumerised science via diagnostics, biomarkers, and AI-driven recommendations, once trapped in clinics, are now delivered through mobile apps, at-home testing, and connected devices.

This dual transformation is creating a flywheel: the more agency consumers want, the more science meets them somewhere near halfway.

We’re already seeing it in a number of spots:
🩸 CGMs moving from diabetes management to performance optimisation.
💊 GLP-1 ecosystems integrating lifestyle + medication.
🧬 Women’s health startups generating entirely new datasets in under-researched biology.

➡️ Full Report Here ⬅️

In the report, we map:
📊 The $2T opportunity space
⚙️ The dual transformation driving it
🏗️ The verticals + horizontals where innovation is compounding
💬 Success patterns and investor frameworks for defensibility

👉 If you’re building in this space, we’d love to hear from you.
Big thanks to Ekin Karamalak for her support with this project!

🏛️ Setting up for Legal success
From your very first conversation about splitting equity to the day an investor asks for your 📜 cap table, how you structure ownership and funding will shape your company’s future. The earliest legal and financial decisions - often made casually on the back of a napkin or in your phone notes - can become the hardest to 🩹 fix later.

Clean founder arrangements, smart fundraising tools, and tax-efficient incentives all help you grow faster, raise cleaner rounds, and keep more control. Together with global law firm CMS, we’ve pulled together advice for aspiring and early founders to help you set up for success.

It covers:
📌 Cap tables that keep ownership clean and clear
📌 ASA (Advanced Subscription Agreements) vs CLN (Convertible Loan Notes)
📌 Paying people with upside, not cash
📌 SEIS/EIS for UK individual investors
✅ And a handy checklist for all of the above…

You can find the full write-up on our Sidekick resource hub here:

Startup Legals

🎪 EVENTS

💶 European Edtech Funding Report Launch
We are super happy to share that we will launch our European Edtech Funding Report 2026 at the Innovation stage at Bett in London 🇬🇧 on Thursday, 22 January. More details to follow, but mark your calendars for the annual publication of this report!

🧩 Product for Learning Meetup
Our first Product For Learning of 2026 welcomes Toby Mather Product Director at Novakid & founder of Lingumi to inspire an intimate gathering of learning change makers on Wednesday, 3 February.

​Toby founded the kids’ English language learning app Lingumi which was acquired by Novakid, Europe's biggest online provider of English-as-a-Foreign-Language tutoring, at the end of 2024. He’s now leading Novakid’s AI transformation, which he describes as a bit like “living in a Harvard case study”.

He will be giving his take on questions including:

• ​Will AI tutoring disrupt live tutoring companies?

• ​How do you even build an AI Tutor?

• ​What is good retention for an AI learning product?

• ​How do live tutoring companies adapt to the risk of disruption?

​As well as the chance to quiz Toby, there will be the opportunity to get to know others building new learning products in breakout discussions.

✏️ Register Interest Now! ✏️

💎 Team Festive Fun!
As promised, a few shots of the team pre-ice, Ben, David, Rhys and Izzy skating, and the team celebrating having completed the Crystal Maze in London!

How are you finding the shorter, darker days - and how are you keeping your energy 🧲 and health up? Are you using an AI Companion to support you? We’re very excited about AI Companions at the moment, exploring 🔎 how AI is moving from tools to intelligent partners that help people decide, not just do. Health management companions is one of the verticals we look at specifically in the recent report Me, Myself and My AI, alongside learning, work and finances. Discover more below 👇🏽, and watch out for another big 📋 report, on consumer health, coming out this week.

Meanwhile, as we are moving fast towards the Festive season, the tech event season is still on – last week was a busy one on the ground in Lisbon 🇵🇹 for Web Summit, and today it’s Moi, from Helsinki 🇫🇮, where Slush is about to kick off.

So, while we’re busy out networking, please enjoy our latest update, including:

• Selected News from the Portfolio – Zen Educate on Deloitte Fast 50

• Insights – The AI Companions Report

• Events – Legal Literacy event next week

Thanks for reading, have a fab Tuesday!

Best,
The Brighteye Team

📣 SELECTED NEWS FROM THE PORTFOLIO

🌟 Zen Educate on Deloitte Fast 50
Reason to celebrate as our portco Zen Educate 🇬🇧, the online platform connecting schools directly with teachers, helping them save money on recruitment agency fees, came out number 40 on the Deloitte Fast 50 2025 - the 50 fastest growing companies in the UK – with a 752% growth. Congratulations, team, you make us proud!

🔮 Forecast AI’s impact on education by 2028?
We are happy to include a guest announcement today, as our close partners and friends over at EdTechnical is running a unique competition to forecast AI’s impact on education by 2028. Rather than hype or vague speculation, they’re seeking specific predictions with evidence and reasoning. Education affects us all - shaping workforce readiness, social mobility, and innovation capacity - so they’re seeking diverse perspectives from anyone thinking seriously about the future of education. With 💰2,500 grand prizes per track, plus judge’s choice and honourable mention awards, this is an opportunity to contribute to a vital public conversation about education’s future. Judges will be from leading organisations such as OpenAI, DeepMind, Gates Foundation, Stanford and many others. Submit by ⏳ Tuesday, 16 December - apply here 🔗 and spread the word.

🔎 INSIGHTS

📱 Me, Myself and My AI
We recently published a report looking at the rise of AI companions, where we reflect on the changing role of AI from tools to partners. For years, we have used AI to get things done - copilots that help us write faster, search smarter, or automate boring stuff.
Now something bigger is happening. AI is starting to move from tasks to trust, from tools to partners. In our report, we call these new systems AI decision companions - they’re persistent, intelligent partners that help people decide, not just do. They remember, adapt, and learn context over time.

What’s exciting is that they are showing up everywhere, including in how people manage health 🧑‍⚕️, finances 💰, learning 🚌, and work 🚌. These relationships between user and solution are becoming more continuous and less transactional.

👉🏻 Full Report Here 👈🏽

In our report, we break down four types of companions shaping the space:
🩺 Functional - trusted advisors in regulated domains (finance, health, education)
🏡 Lifestyle - assistants for daily choices (travel, shopping, home)
💬 Relational - built for connection and support
🌐 Generalist - “life OS” companions spanning it all

🎪 EVENTS

Happening…

🇫🇮 Moi, Slush!
Our scarves 🧣 and gloves 🧤 are on - we are at Slush week in Helsinki! Benoit Wirz, Isabella Vahdati, Ghita Targhi and Hege Tollerud are in Finland 🍧 and keen to connect with all who are excited about building in the future of learning and work space!
Let us know if you want to meet ☃️ during or in between the main or side events in the next few days - 18-20 November!

Coming up…

📎 Legal Literacy for Founders

Calling all founders who can be in London 🇬🇧 next week, on 26 November... ⏰
We have teamed up with global law firm CMS to host an evening of practical legal matters, focused on building good contracts and structuring deals, including fundraising rounds. Louis Glass, Global Co-Head of Tech M&A at CMS, and Benoit Wirz, one of our Founding Partners, are hosting a Legal Literacy session - just for you!

If you are an early-stage founder and have ever wondered...
“Which terms should I expect to negotiate with my investors?”
“How should I decide which convertible instruments to use?”
“How should I set up my option pool?”
“How should I handle my early employment contracts with my team?”

... Then this is the session for you.

Click on the image ⬇️ to register your interest ✏️

Already happened…

💫 Inspiring evening for Aspiring Females
A couple of weeks back, our Senior Associate Isabella Vahdati, alongside Kirsten Meehan and Eleanor Warnock, hosted Starling Bank founder Anne Boden for an open conversation on career navigation and her journey building a category-defining company. The event was part of the work they are leading in the Aspiring Female Partners network – which is growing fast and becoming a key arena in the community of female investors on their path to partners.

🧩 Product For Learning Meetup
Our London office ground floor was packed full of founders and product leaders keen to learn from each other, from BridgeU Founder Lucy Stonehill and from our event partner Matt Walton, when Lucy shared her journey to BridgeU being acquired by Kaplan - loads of hands-on advice and food for thought to discuss in groups.

Lucy founded the university guidance platform in 2014 when such services didn’t exist. They built a market-leading position with schools and then, after being acquired by Kaplan in 2020, pivoted their business model to 🎓 universities.

Thanks to all who joined 🌟, it is always a pleasure to host you!

Happy October!

Getting to the other side of summer always means time for the Brighteye Portfolio Summit - one of our major energy boosts 🌿 of the year, getting the Family together for a couple of days. This September, Founders, Mentors, the team and a selection of guests enjoyed connecting, sharing, learning and games at the stunning Ashridge House in Hertfordshire, 🇬🇧 UK. Check out the little video at the end, to catch some of the vibe!

Below you can explore all the latest updates from us, including:

• Selected News from the Portfolio – 3 Portcos on Sifted’s 250 Fastest Growing Startups

• Insights – Learning + Work Festival 2025 Recordings

• Events – Product For Learning and Legal Literacy Evenings

We hope you’ll enjoy!

Best,
The Brighteye Team

📣 SELECTED NEWS FROM THE PORTFOLIO

🏆 Three portfolio companies on Sifted 250 Fastest Growing Startups
We’re happy to see three of our portfolio companies achieving well-deserved recognition on the Sifted 250 Fastest Growing Startups in Europe. 🇪🇸 Shakers (96), 🇬🇷 Wikifarmer (106) and 🇬🇧 Zen Educate (214) all made it to the list, announced recently. Big congratulations to all, let’s go!

👏 Lynx x IBM SkillsBuild Partnership
Great new partnership launch for Lynx Educate, helping companies tackle their strategic business challenges through social impact by investing in education within their communities, and IBM SkillsBuild, a free education program aimed at increasing access to technology education. Together, they aim to reach learners across universities, schools, and frontline workplaces, providing free access to AI and digital skills, offering personalised learning paths, hands-on experience and industry-recognised credentials to help learners of all backgrounds build the skills needed for in-demand technology careers.

🔎 INSIGHTS

📹 Festival Recordings - they are all live
We had a blast hosting our annual Learning + Work Festival a few weeks ago, enjoying 7 online sessions with excellent speakers and attentive audiences. The editing of all recordings is done, you can check them out now:

Day 1 - Tuesday 7 October:
🟢 Pre-Session: Brighteye Update – Ben Wirz, Brighteye
🟢 Session 1: How Strategic Communication can help Attract Funding – Eleanor Warnock, journalist (Ex Sifted Dep Editor) & Jörn Dunker, ballou PR
🟢 Session 2: Product Market Fit – Pavlo Pedenko, Mathema (ex Wise) & Scott Eblen, Monzo Bank & Rhys Spence, Brighteye
🟢 Session 3: B2B Sales – Edward Kyei, N47, Mathieu Parin, Payfit & Frank Visciano, Ex Udemy

Day 2 - Wednesday 8 October:
🟢 Session 4: Customer Success – Jeremy Ambrose, Zendesk, Benjamin Hempel, Scandit & Andrea Spillmann-Gajek, Success Accelerators
🟢 Session 5: AI in Marketing – Lauren Crichton, Sana, Amy Spurgeon, WPP & Rhys Spence, Brighteye
🟢 Session 6: How to raise a Series A-B in 2025 – Daniel Zacharias, Sdui & Ben Wirz, Brighteye

Grab your popcorn and enjoy!!

🍎 Gen Z and the new Education Compact
A new generation is reshaping how we think about learning and work. Gen Z (and soon, Gen Alpha) are demanding change in how we learn, build careers, and define success. They’re building new compacts between learning, identity, and purpose.
In this article, our Head of Platform and Research Rhys Spence was inspired by Laura McGinnis‘ blog “Gen Z’s Reverse Flynn Effect: is it Brain Rot, AI or Just Microplastics?” - thundering through her personal and Balderton Capital‘s evolving thesis in this space.

👉🏻 Full Blog Here! 👈🏽

Rhys builds on the blog’s central ideas 💡 and layers in some of our own. In short, claiming that this generation may be sketching a blueprint for the next era of learning - one in which:
🔹⁠ ⁠Credentials are increasingly portable
🔹 ⁠Mental health is infrastructural
🔹⁠ ⁠AI is a collaborator, not a threat

The change is already happening. And new solutions are being built. If you’re one of the 🔨 builders, we’d love to talk to you.

🎧 Sidekick Podcast: Software Is eating learning: The $3 trillion opportunity
For years, software mostly kept records: it turned filing cabinets into databases. Now, with AI, we’re moving from systems of record to systems of work with tools that do the job, not just track it. That shift matters deeply for the learning space: the education software market is roughly $200B – BUT, the labour market in education (trainers, teachers, tutors, etc.) is more than $3T! That’s where the next wave of opportunity might lie.

In this Sidekick episode, our Partner David Guérin briefly discusses this matter:
📌 The education labour market is 15x larger than the education software market
📌 The next generation of learning startups will monetise outcomes, not licences
📌 Pricing will shift from per seat to per result, think “per certification”

▶️ Listen in Here! ◀️

✏️ Mentor Article - Executive Business Reviews 101
In this recent article, our Customer Success Mentor Andrea Spillmann-Gajek formed a breakdown of how regular, strategic meetings with clients can transform relationships and outcomes.

The key takeaways:
🔑 They help you really understand the client’s goals and concerns, not just deliver what’s been asked
🔑 They force you to understand and measure value, quantitatively and qualitatively, and ensure the customer sees that value
🔑 They expose risks early, open up opportunities (new features, upsells, referrals), and keep both sides aligned on what’s next
🔑 They aren’t status-update sessions or sales pitches in disguise: EBRs are about strategy, partnership, growth

If your team isn’t doing EBRs yet, or is not doing them well ⁉️ we think this is a must-read.

🔍 Explore it today in Sidekick, our insights pages, here!

🎪 EVENTS

Coming up…

🧩 Product For Learning Meetup
We’re excited to host another Product For Learning evening with Matt Walton at our office in a few weeks, on Wednesday, 12 November. This time we’ll hear from Lucy Stonehill, who will share insights about her BridgeU journey and how to understand the value of what you offer.

Lucy founded the university guidance platform in 2014 when such services didn’t exist. They built a market-leading position with schools and then, after being acquired by Kaplan in 2020, pivoted their business model to universities.

She’s full of insights about how to do sales-led product discovery, understand how your customers think about price and the value of what you bring. She’s also got lots of great stuff to say on the different approach you need to take to your early and late majority from your pioneering early adopters.

We have a few spots available for this in-person event, please register your interest to join here!

📎 Legal Literacy for Founders
We have teamed up with the team at law firm CMS to host an evening of practical legal matters, focused on building good contracts and structuring deals, including fundraising rounds.

Join us for this relaxed, happy-hour style session that turns legal jargon into practical moves you can use tomorrow, as well as pizza, beers and great conversations in London on Wednesday, 26 November!

✏️ Register Interest Here ✏️

Already happened…

🇳🇴 Oslo Innovation Week
We hit the Oslo ground for Oslo Innovation Week last week, with three team members busy hosting, speaking at and attending many of the total of 80+ events, big and small, across the city.

We hosted a lunch event on Thursday, 23 October, where Benoit Wirz and Isabella Vahdati shared an update on our investment thesis and approach to investing in founders building the future of learning and work. Guests at the lovely Centropa restaurant at the Oslo public library Deichman also heard from portfolio company Installer.com’s Gunnar Windsand Sem.

We also co-hosted the Investor Lounge at the must-attend 🎤 Venture Karaoke Night, and really enjoyed meeting 200 people from the Norwegian, Nordic and beyond startup ecosystem.

🎬 The Portfolio Summit video
You’ve made it here – thanks for reading. Time to check out our Portfolio Summit energy:

Welcome to this Special Edition newsletter, brought to you as we are making the final preparations for our Learning + Work Festival 2025. We really hope you will join us for one or more of the 7 online Sessions we are hosting across two afternoons next week, on Tuesday, 7 and Wednesday, 8 October.

To kick it all off, there will be a Brighteye update on our thesis and approach to backing Founders building the Future of Learning + Work, before we head into a selection of operational areas relevant to building and scaling your business.

All sessions are online and free to attend, full details and registration👇🏽.

See you next week?

Best,
👋🏽 The Brighteye Team

DAY 1 - Tuesday 7 October

🟢 Pre-Session: Welcome to the Festival + Brighteye Update
We’ll run through what’s in store for the Festival, followed by an update on Brighteye and our approach to investing in the Learning + Work landscape.

Speakers:
🟢 Ben Wirz, Founding Partner, Brighteye
🟢 Rhys Spence, Head of Platform & Research, Brighteye
🟢 Hege Tollerud, Head of Community & Events, Brighteye

🟢 Session 1: How Strategic Communication can help Attract Funding
Communications leaders will walk through some basics of PR and how to maximise the reach and impact of your media work with your target audiences.

Speakers:
🟢 Eleanor Warnock, Freelance Journalist and Communications Advisor
🟢 Jörn Dunker, Managing Director, Ballou Spain
🟢 Hege Tollerud, Head of Community & Events, Brighteye

🟢 Session 2: Product Market Fit
We will dive into how companies can reach PMF faster and more efficiently, using a data-driven approach to run and understand rapid experimentation.

​Speakers:
🟢 Pavlo Pedenko, CPO & Co-Founder, Mathema (Ex Wise)
🟢 Scott Eblen, VP of Product, Monzo Bank
🟢 Rhys Spence, Head of Platform & Research, Brighteye

🟢 Session 3: B2B Sales
This session focuses on leveraging data to drive sales priorities (funnel and performance management) and building executive relationships to turn global companies into lasting customers​

Speakers:
🟢 Edward Kyei, Global Engagement Manager, N47
🟢 Mathieu Parin, Global Sales Operations Director, PayFit
🟢 Frank Visciano, Former COO, Udemy

DAY 2 - Wednesday 8 October

🟢 Session 4: Customer Success
We will address how AI is reshaping the customer success function in leading organisations, enabling increasingly personalised relationship management and support.

​Speakers:
🟢 Jeremy Ambrose, Senior Partners Manager, Zendesk for Startups
🟢 Benjamin Hempel, Senior Director – Customer Success & Solutions Consulting (APAC &EMEA), Scandit
🟢 Andrea Spillmann-Gajek, Founder, Success Accelerators

🟢 Session 5: AI in Marketing
Hear how senior marketers are integrating AI within the function, featuring examples and insights on how leaders are building and shaping teams capable of realising AI’s marketing potential.

​Speakers:
🟢 Lauren Crichton, Director of Marketing, Sana
🟢 Sophia Ahrel, Fractional CMO
🟢 Amy Spurgeon, VP of Growth, WPP

🟢 Session 6: How to raise a Series A-B in 2025
We dive into what it takes to raise a successful Series A-B round in 2025. ​Sdui recently secured €95M in fresh funding, in a round led by Bain Capital. In this session, Daniel Zacharias, Founder and CEO, will share some of the experience from the process.

​Hear from:
🟢 Daniel Zacharias, Founder & CEO, Sdui
🟢 Ben Wirz, Founding Partner, Brighteye

Meet our Speakers:

This week, our Founding Partner Ben reflected a little on how European Edtech is having a bit of a moment, with large (~€100M) rounds announced by Sdui and Lingokids, companies like Ornikar and Yoto now well over €100M in revenue and, of course, the $1.1B acquisition of Sana by Workday announced on Tuesday. It turns out there is a lot of value in using tech to help people learn and grow!

Launched in 2017, we have been an early believer in this sector, investing in Ornikar and Sdui, among others that are seeing great traction at scale. That said, as a society, we believe we're still very much in the early innings of leveraging technology to help people learn. AI is making it possible to dramatically personalise education, identify and enhance talent and connect learning and productivity seamlessly. It's also increasing labour volatility and necessitating changes in educational and career pathways, creating opportunities to reinvent the way we find work and augment human capital on the job.

We can’t wait to keep these conversations going, alongside diving into operational areas of building great companies, when we get our Founders together for our annual Portfolio Summit just outside London next week. And we’ll keep them running also across the two days of our online Learning + Work Festival 2025 in early October – all the details on that below ⬇️.

Thanks for your support, this update includes:

• Investment Update – who’s raising?

• Insights – Solving Construction’s Memory and Compliance Problem

• Events – Festival, Festival, Festival

• Selected News from the Portfolio – Twenix launching new languages

Have a good read!

Best,
🟢 The Brighteye Team

💰 INVESTMENT UPDATE

👀 We will be announcing a new member of the Brighteye portfolio Family very soon!

🔍 And we have room for more fabulous Founders! We invest early in tech that helps people learn, work and thrive and are looking for European entrepreneurs who are building the next great companies in this space. If that's you or someone you know, please do reach out!

🔎 INSIGHTS

🚧 Solving Construction’s Memory and Compliance Problem…
We recently published Part 2 of our Heavy Industries Series: Construction – Solving the Sector’s Memory and Compliance Problem.

Each new construction project brings new teams, tools, and expectations - but leaves behind the lessons learned.

What's the result❓

Repeated mistakes, spiralling costs, and growing compliance risks. 'Re-work' already costs the industry ~€1.6T annually, and regulatory demands are rising.

🌊 But a new wave of startups is changing that, embedding intelligence into workflows, preserving knowledge across projects, and turning compliance from a roadblock into a competitive edge. From smart QA systems and embedded learning to AI-powered code checks, a new construction tech stack is emerging—one that’s finally designed around the people doing the work. They enable:

• Real-time knowledge capture

• Workflow standardisation

• Regulatory foresight

• Field-to-design communication

• Scalable team training

🚧 Full Report here! 🚧

💡 ICYMI, here’s Part 1 of the Heavy Industries series, too - The $1 Trillion Manufacturing Skills Gap, where we explore how manufacturing is being transformed by workforce enablement.

🔗 Manufacturing Report 🔗

📲 The first release of our Sidekick PRODUCT collection
Product functions help startups align on what to build and why, ensuring focus on solving real customer problems. They provide structure for prioritisation, so limited resources are used effectively. We formed this content collection on Product because we want to help startups get this function right!

What does the first release cover?
1️⃣ Building product discipline
2️⃣ What a good product strategy looks like (and who owns it)
3️⃣ How engineering and product should work together

The Collection features comments from one of our brilliant Product Mentors, Jonathan Hey, author and former Chief Product Officer at Zen Educate and Head of UX at Nutmeg.

👉🏻 Sidekick Product Collection 👈🏽

👀 And arriving on our Sidekick resource hub soon, we will cover i) Balancing Speed and Quality, ii) Product Development Process and iii) Using Data in your Product Function.

🔎 Mentor Guide – Client Review Meetings

Forming your Business Review Process in a repeatable, impactful way is key to maintaining healthy relationships with your customers.
In this new guide, our 🌟 Customer Success Mentor Andrea Spillmann-Gajek (Success Accelerators) gives you practical tips on:

📍 Preparing for the review
📍 What to do during the review
📍 How to follow up for max impact

▶️ Check out the full guide! ◀️

🎪 EVENTS

🟢 Festival, Festival, Festival
Our annual Learning + Work Festival is fast approaching, with 7-8 October shaping up to be a couple of days full of great content. We really hope to see you for one or more of the 6 online sessions, and/or the bonus Brighteye Update session.

The operational areas we’ll cover are:

• Brighteye Update

• How to Raise a Series A-B in 2025?

• Product Market Fit

• B2B Sales

• Customer Success

• International Expansion - Marketing

• Funding and Investment – from a PR perspective

You can register to attend the individual sessions via the links above 👆

A selection of the Speakers - we’re announcing more by the day, keep up to date on our LinkedIn here!

‼️ Aspiring Female Partners Back to the Office – New Date
Our Isabella Vahdati and Kirsten Meehan of Omnea are building a vibrant community for ✨ Aspiring Female Partners, and they recently had to shift their latest event - featuring Anne Boden, Founder of Starling Bank - to Tuesday, 4 November.

Anne built one of the UK’s most successful challenger banks 🏦 from the ground up, and she’s joining us in person to share the highs, the challenges, and the lessons learned along the way.
A huge thank you 🙏🏻 to Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati for hosting us - we can’t wait to fill the room with great conversations and connections.

Register your interest to attend here now – spaces are limited!

🛤️ Let’s Meet on Tour?
On the Big, In-Person Event Circuit we will in the coming few weeks be in Munich during Bits & Pretzels, Barcelona for norrsken’s Impact/Week, Paris at the Unlock VC Summit and Dublin for SaaStock. Please hit us up if you’d like to meet!!

📣 SELECTED NEWS FROM THE PORTFOLIO

🌎 More Languages on Twenix
Exciting announcement from Twenix, offering personalised lessons for business language learning, who are pre-launching new languages alongside English for companies. Spanish, French and Portuguese will be on the learning menu moving forward, find out how to get involved here!

🎤 Skiller Whale key role at CTO Craft Con in Berlin
Next Week, our portfolio company Skiller Whale, a leading provider of online training and learning solutions for tech teams and individuals, will be active on stage, floor and side events during CTO Craft Con in Berlin. Catch the team on 23-24 September to learn more!

🍏 Expansion grant for sAInaptic
Congrats to sAInaptic, providing AI assisted real-time evaluation of professional knowledge & skills, on winning a Ufi grant to expand their technology's capabilities to assess images and videos. Upwards, team – we can’t wait to see the results!

We hope you’ve had and are having a super Summer, charging and gearing up for an action-packed Q3/4. On our end, it’s already started, with an intense week at TechBBQ and full preparations ongoing for our Portfolio Summit in September.

This month’s newsletter includes:

• Investment Update - Sdui bags €95M in fresh growth investment

• Insights – Research tools, manufacturing & more

• Events – Launching Festival Speakers

We hope you’ll enjoy!

Best,
🌻 Team Brighteye

💰 INVESTMENT UPDATE

👏 Sdui Secures €95M
Congratulations to our portfolio company Sdui, who recently announced a milestone €95M strategic growth investment led by Bain Capital Ventures’ Tech Opportunities fund - with participation from existing funders HV Capital and HTGF | High-Tech Gründerfonds.

We caught up with Founder and CEO Daniel Zacharias to get his reaction and hear his vision for what a Europe-wide 🇪🇺 operating system for schools will look like, and what benefit it brings for European students, teachers and parents.

We first backed Daniel and the Sdui team in 2021 and again in 2023 and 2024.

Our Founding Partner Benoit Wirz said:
❝European schools deserve a modern cloud-based OS that can accelerate learning by streamlining administration, data retrieval and communication. As the most comprehensive solution with broad adoption throughout the region, Sdui is the clear European leader, and we are thrilled they will have more resources to further their mission❞

You can also hear Daniel speak at our Learning + Work Festival in October – details in the Events section below👇🏽!

🔎 INSIGHTS

🏭 The $1 Trillion Manufacturing Skills Gap
Factories don’t run on machines alone. While automation is accelerating, manufacturing workers inside factories need to learn new skills. Training still happens in classrooms, knowledge walks out the door with retiring operators, and new hires are dropped into complex environments with little support.

The result is a skills gap that could cost the US economy $1 trillion 😳 by 2030. And Europe is facing the same challenge.

But a new wave of startups is stepping up, not with more slide decks, but with workflow-native tools that embed training, knowledge, and compliance directly on the factory floor. This isn’t conventional e-learning. It’s real-time enablement that reduces downtime, accelerates onboarding, and builds a future-ready workforce.

👉 In this first piece in our new Heavy Industries Series, we explore how manufacturing is being transformed by workforce enablement.

🔎 Read the Full Piece here 🔍

🗺️ Research Tools report + Market Map
Research is a powerful driver of progress, helping us explore and understand the unknown, build new knowledge, and solve complex problems. For decades, it has relied on rigorous, often lengthy, time-consuming processes: reviewing literature, running experiments, gathering and interpreting data, publishing and peer reviewing results. These systems have built much of the world in which we live. However, we are observing a shift in the landscape and an emergence of new tools, which have the potential to reshape the ways in which we carry out research.

We dove into this space, looking at tools in life sciences, engineering and academic research... What did we learn about opportunities in the space?

🔹 Structured, usable data remains the biggest unlock
🔹 Research infrastructure is still fragmented & ripe for verticalised reinvention
🔹 LLM-native workflows are creating new UX standards in research
🔹 AI is compressing discovery cycles, but synthesis and scale-up remain broken
🔹 Clinical trials and real-world validation are under-optimised and underserved
🔹 AI-powered literature synthesis and insight generation is becoming critical
🔹 Vertical AI startups must focus on defensible niches or infrastructure plays

The report features a market map, of course... supporting startups and the ecosystem to understand the pockets of activity.

▶️ Full Report here ◀️

🌟 An Exclusive on the US DoE’s Innovation Research programme
Edward Metz ran the U.S. Department of Education's Innovation Research programme for 20 years. After moving away from the role earlier this year, he ran a review of the programme with Eric Tucker from The Study Group. We feel privileged to share some of the findings.

What did the review find?
💥 The programme achieved massive scale, reaching 130.6 million users.
💥 More than half of the companies supported by the programme raised follow-on funding from investors.
💥 It achieved an impressive 9x return on public investment.

Ed and Eric shared their key takeaways for funders and policymakers:
➡️ Structured, research-based R&D leads to go-to-market strategies.
➡️ Public capital can de-risk meaningful innovation. Indeed, 75% of firms indicated their product would not exist without ED/IES SBIR funding.
➡️ Investments in concepts originated by researchers or educators pay off. While all projects were led by firms, 55% of products either originated in a university by an academic researcher or a graduate student or in a classroom by an educator.
➡️ Research and evidence are value drivers. In education, where procurement is cautious and outcomes matter, research- and evidence-backed products scale more successfully.
➡️ Companies managed to leverage public funds for next-level growth. 88% of firms reported follow-on funding after their ED/IES SBIR awards for more research and to reach scale.

👀 Access the Full Report Here 👀

🎪 EVENTS

🇩🇰 TechBBQ this week
The event season has already kicked off, with us joining TechBBQ in Copenhagen, and a lot of the side events this week. We started by hosting an investor lunch, getting an amazing group of investors together in a tower overlooking the wonderful Danish capital. Food, drinks and conversations helped us kick off in style – thanks to all who joined!

🇬🇧 Aspiring Females - New Event
Our Isabella Vahdati and Kirsten Meehan of Omnea are building a vibrant community for ✨ Aspiring Female Partners, and they recently announced their next event - featuring Anne Boden, Founder of Starling Bank - on Wednesday, 10 September. Anne built one of the UK’s most successful challenger banks 🏦 from the ground up, and she’s joining us in person to share the highs, the challenges, and the lessons learned along the way.

A huge thank you 🙏🏻 to Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati for hosting us - we can’t wait to fill the room with great conversations and connections.

Register your interest to attend here now – spaces are limited!

🟢 Learning + Work Festival 2025 Speakers - coming soon...
We are back hosting our annual startup Festival this October - a series of 6 online 💻 Sessions tuned in on building and growing in the Learning + Work space.

We’ll start 📢 announcing Speakers shortly – please register now to be the first to get updates on the 7-8 October events!

We hope you are having an excellent ⛱️ July! As we all know, life in the Startup world does not stop due to a bit of summer, and we will be sharing some big announcements in the near future 👀.

Meanwhile, like every summer, July at Brighteye means preparing for the virtual Festival we’ll be hosting for the fourth time this autumn. This year, we’re updating the focus - it’s now the Learning + Work Festival, and we have some other exciting news on it, too.

Read all about the Festival in this update, which also includes:

• Insights – PR Collection and Mentor Article on Customer Value

• Events – TechBBQ and Nordic Edtech Summit coming up

We hope you are enjoying the summer, so far!

Best,
🌻 Team Brighteye

🔎 INSIGHTS

📂 New Sidekick Content Collection – PR
Our latest Collection on the Brighteye Sidekick resource hub is now live – covering the world of 📣 PR and media relations. In a series of posts, we explore what PR and media relations work looks like in practice, including realistic (but ambitious) expectations about 🗞️ outcomes.

➡️ Check out the full Collection! ⬅️

It covers:

• PR – The What and the Why?

• Mastering the Core Brand Message

• Catching the Journalist’s Attention

• Driving the Media Agenda

• When to work with an Agency – or not?

🧡 Defining and Measuring Customer Value
In the latest guest blog post from our excellent Customer Success Mentor Andrea Spillmann-Gajek, she breaks down 🔍 how to define and measure customer value.

👉🏻 Full Blog Post here 👈🏽

It features gold dust like this:

There’s no single magic solution, but hopefully you’ll come away with at least a few new ways of thinking about value and ideas to get you closer to measuring value. The key is to start where you are, measure what you can, and get creative, Andrea writes.

🎪 EVENTS

💻 Introducing the Learning + Work Festival 2025
Preparations are on for the Festival! This October, we are back hosting a series of online Sessions tuned in on building, operating and growing in the Learning + Work space.

The session headlines are set:

• How to Raise a Series B in 2025?

• Product Market Fit

• B2B Sales

• Customer Success

• Marketing

• Funding and Investment – from a PR perspective

The speakers are being confirmed and details are in the making – register now to not miss any updates on the 7-8 October events!

✒️ Register Interest Here! 🖋️

If there are speakers you’d like to hear from, please do get in touch – we want to make this as helpful as possible for the community.

New this year, we are introducing Partnerships. We’ve invited some big industry stakeholders to join us and help the Festival have an even greater impact and reach than in previous years. Today, we are proud to share that Hubspot is on board, and we have a few more lined up for announcements in the weeks to come.

☀ We’ll be in the Nordics in August and September
A little bit quiet on the events front gives us time to prepare for what’s coming. There are two to flag! We will be heading to the Nordics for TechBBQ, where Izzy and Hege will be on the ground in Copenhagen. In addition to attending, we’ll host/co-host a couple of smaller community side events on 26-28 August - more info coming shortly.

In September, our Head of Platform and Research Rhys will moderate the investment panel at the Nordic Edtech Summit in Malmö on 10 September, looking at “how Edtech businesses can best raise funding and position themselves most powerfully to investors.”

There are still tickets if you want to be part of the event, hosted by Jonathan Viner of the Nordic Edtech News.

📸 Final London Edtech Week Event recap
Back in June, we concluded our London EdTech Week activities by co-hosting an afternoon of panels at the Cooley LLP office, partnering with Cooley, Oppenheimer & Co. Inc., and EDT&Partners. We were looking at “How to manage growth in a changing Global market?” through four panels, an inspiring Fireside chat with Kahoot!-CEO Eilert Giertsen Hanoa, moderated by Matthew Johnson, and, of course, a networking reception.

From the midst of London Edtech Week, we are happy to share a quick update on recent activities. Including:

• Selected News from the Portfolio – sAInaptic and Shakers on Impressive Lists

• Insights – Anonymous Exits Pt. 06

• Events – Recapping a lot of Recent Activities

We hope you’ll enjoy!

Best,
The Brighteye Team 💐

🔮 sAInaptic on UK’s Most Promising list
Great to see sAInaptic, our portco using AI technology to deliver realtime, personalised, examiner-quality feedback to free text answers, on the UK’s Most Promising Early-stage Tech Startups list, published by Tech Nation. Way to go, team!

🪜 Shakers #18 on Sifted’s Top 100
Shakers, building the Operating System for High-Performance Freelancers powered by AI, smart matching, and a fully integrated platform to drive the future of work, has been ranked #18 in the Sifted100: France & Southern Europe 2025, recognising the fastest-growing startups in the region. We are proud to support this amazing team that over the past year has grown revenue 6x, reached a community of 10,000+ freelancers, worked with 450+ companies, including Microsoft, Inditex and Telefónica, and closed a €14M Series A to scale across Europe.

🔎 INSIGHTS

🚪 Anonymous Exits Pt 6
In the 6th edition of our Anonymous Exits Series, we spoke to a Founder who built a fast-growing business “from a park in Brooklyn to a nationwide movement”. Founders naturally dream of building something massive in impact, scale and financial outcome. But the reality is that many founders need to secure more modest exits. These exits can still be highly successful. We wanted to shed some light on this process from a Founder's perspective. We will be doing more cases like this in the coming weeks!

👉🏻 Read the Full Blog 👈🏽

It spans:
🔹 How a personal mission turned into a scaled business
🔹 The challenges of aligning impact with scale
🔹 What it felt like to sell the company successfully amid challenging external conditions

🎪 EVENTS

It’s been a busy June, and as we are about to kick off the final London Edtech Week event that we are co-hosting, here’s some of what we’ve been up to.

📸 The London Edtech Week 2025 Official Opening
This Monday we celebrated 🎉 the Official Opening of London EdTech Week with our wonderful co-hosts Cooley LLP. The Opening kicked off ⚡️ a week of activities in style, with conversations buzzing among 150+ guests in the Light Bar & Dining Backyard.

⚙️ PMF for Transformative Learning Workshop
30 attendees just left the building after our PMF workshop with Matt Walton this morning. We explored the four dimensions needed to crack in order to find product-market fit. We also covered the common stages that need to be worked through find that fit. With a very engaged group of startups, we brought these dimensions and stages to life with case studies.

☀️ Aspiring Female Summer Mixer
So inspired by the buzz of the Aspiring Female Partners Summer Mixer – co-hosted by Notion Capital's Kirsten Meehan & Brighteye’s Isabella Vahdati, in partnership with unlock VC (previously WVC:E) and Cooley LLP. A floor full of talented, young, female VCs connecting with and learning from each other, with the honest and open conversation 🎤 between Angie Ma, co-Founder of Faculty and ex-Sifted Deputy Editor Eleanor Warnock as a highlight. Great to see how this important community is growing so fast 🌱 - we are looking forward to many more of these!

🇪🇸 Madrid during South Summit
We had a few busy days in Madrid during South Summit at the beginning of the month, with team Brighteye out in force – speaking, moderating and judging at the Main event, hosting and attending a bunch of side events. This included hosting a Young VC Dinner, gathering a group of investors for a simple idea: great people, great food, no agenda. The team and friends also shared breakfast and made a few appearances on stage:
🔦 On a panel on Founder Burnout: The Hidden Challenge in Building Great Companies, alongside Amir Kaplan (ifeel), Itxaso del Palacio, PhD (Notion Capital) and Pelin Gonul Sahin (Founder Being)
🔦 Chatting about the future of the workplace with Alex Hernandez (Jobgether) and Pablo De La Hoz (zityhub)
🔦 Judging the Future of Work & Talent startup pitches

We now also have Startup Royalty in our Portfolio, with team Shakers chosen by King Felipe VI of Spain as the company he wanted to visit for a 15-minute conversation on their stand.

🎞️ We managed to capture some of the action:

🌱 Build. Scale. Adapt. Exit - SXSW London side gig
As SXSW descended on London at the beginning of June, we did an afternoon full of panels diving into the complete Founder and Investor journey from sketching out your big idea to scaling 📈 up to new heights, before making an Exit. Co-Hosted at the stunning Cooley LLP HQ, alongside EDT&Partners and Oppenheimer & Co. Inc., during the week of SXSW London, we explored the highs, lows, and wild pivots that come with building something great. The key element across the sessions was building 🌟 relations, so it was all, of course, followed by networking, with spectacular views!

🏆 Best Venture Fund at EdtechC Award 2025
Oh, and last but not least, we won an Award!! Proud moment as we were presented with the EdTechX Award 2025 for Best Venture Fund 🎈 at the EdtechX Summit 2025 during London EdTech Week.
🙏🏻 A huge thank you to co-founder Kavitha Ravindran at our portfolio company sAInaptic for the nomination - it means a lot!

It's been ace seeing a lot of you over the past few weeks – hope to see you 👋🏽 again soon!

We hope it’s a Happy Thursday!

Spring is in the air across Europe, the surest sign of it being that the event season is in full bloom. We’ve got loads going on, why not just jump straight in❓

This update includes:

• Investment Update - Reinvestment in Shakers

• Selected News from the Portfolio – New Podcast from Tandem

• Insights – Introducing 2 New Content Collections

• Events – SXSW London, South Summit Madrid, London Tech Week, VivaTech Paris, London Edtech Week etc….

And much more – we hope you’ll enjoy!

Best,
The Brighteye Team ☀️

💰 INVESTMENT UPDATES

🔁 Reinvestment - Shakers - €14M Series A
Shakers just announced their €14M Series A funding round! We are very proud to continue our support for the Spanish scaleup “building the infrastructure for the future of work, making it simpler for companies to connect with independent talent - fast, flexible, and friction-free.”

Led by Partech, with participation from Kfund, Athos Capital, Wayra and us, this investment will be used to keep 🧱 expanding across Europe and launching new tools that empower freelancers, from onboarding to delivery, changing the way people work.

When we first invested in the impressive Shakers team in 2023, it was clear that Héctor, Nico, Jaime, Adrian and the team were creating a movement in Spain around "freeworking," addressing a critical pain point for traditional companies.

Our Partner David Guérin said:
❝The connection was immediate. They had everything we look for: strong market pull, a team of talented and complementary founders, a healthy balance of ambition and humility, and exceptional technical expertise paired with deep market insights.❞

👉🏻 Full We We Invested 👈🏽

📰 The news secured some great media coverage, too – check out the stories on Tech.eu, EU-Startups, Tech Funding News, Tech Startups, Startup Rise, FinSMEs, Startups Magazine

📣 SELECTED NEWS FROM THE PORTFOLIO

👏 Shakers on VivaTech Top 100 Rising Startups
Speaking of Shakers, you can catch them at Viva Technology – where they have been named in the Top 100 Rising Startups and will present in front of the Paris crowd at the 11-14 June event. Keep it coming, team!

🎧 Tandem Launches New Podcast
Interested in all things languages, travel 🧳 and culture? We can recommend the new “Connected By Language" Podcast from our portfolio company Tandem, the platform helping you “master any language by chatting with real people”! Hosted by Michele Paroli, each episode will explore a new country and shine a light on what makes their culture so special and interview some of the most dedicated language learners out there. Tune in now!

🔎 INSIGHTS

🗂️ Two New Content Collections – Impact and Finance
We keep launching new content on the Brighteye Sidekick resource hub, and in the past month we have added two new series of articles – on Impact and Finance.

Impact
In this Collection, we share content to help you understand, measure, build on and communicate your Impact, including:
🔸 What is Impact?
🔸 The startup case for impact
🔸 Designing for impact
🔸 Measuring what matters
🔸 Communicating impact

With thanks to our wonderful Impact Mentors, Jennifer Coogan and Professor Natalia Kucirkova, for the reviews and comments!

➡️ Full Collection Here ⬅️

Natalia followed up with a Mentor Article, discussing the importance of showing evidence of Impact in Edtech. She argues that tables are starting to turn, with momentum, both funding and growth, building on companies actively demonstrating impact made on the learning.

Please also check out the short soundbites we recorded with Jenny, covering: What is Impact, Why think of Impact from the beginning, What Makes good Impact Metrics.

Finance
In this series of articles, our Head of Finance, Mattheus Dias, shares useful guidance on your approach to finance matters in your startup. The content will support you as you begin working with finance professionals. It covers:
🔹 Management & Financial Accounting
🔹 Cash flow
🔹 Reporting
🔹 Budgeting

▶️ Full Finance Collection ◀️

✒️ Rethinking the ARR-to-CSM Ratio
Our Customer Success Mentor Andrea Spillmann-Gajek looks closely at ARR:CSM (Customer Success Management) ratios in this blog post she penned for us.

The article includes:
💡 Factors that indicate whether your ARR:CSM ratio is in the right ballpark
💡 Setting realistic ratios and building to scale
💡 Recognising when your ratio is too low or too high
💡 Alternative metrics you can consider

Click image 👇🏽 for the full blog post:

⚙️ Edtech is Core Infrastructure for the AI Economy
In a recent blog post, we present the Brighteye take on "Why Edtech is core infrastructure for the AI economy." Edtech is the most overlooked lever in 🗝️ unlocking AI’s true societal and economic value, writes Rhys Spence, our Head of Platform and Research. We point to Sana’s partnership with Swedish government and YC’s latest call for startups as evidence.

🔎 Read the Full Article 🔍

🇬🇧 Our Comments on PISCES
The UK is pioneering a new era for private markets with the launch of PISCES - the Private Intermittent Securities and Capital Exchange System. This government-backed initiative introduces a regulated platform for private companies to facilitate controlled, periodic share trading events. Check out Rhys’ article commenting on this UK bet on founder- and employee-friendly capital markets.

Why this matters:
💰 Liquidity for Founders & Employees: Enables early stakeholders to realise gains without waiting for an IPO or acquisition
🤝 Investor Opportunities: Opens avenues for investors (and others...!) to engage with high-growth private companies
🌎 Global Competitiveness: Positions the UK as a leading hub for startups seeking flexible capital solutions

🖇️ The Full Story 🖇️

🎪 EVENTS

The Spring-Summer 25 Event Season has kicked off, and we’re excited to be involved in a lot of the action. Some recaps of what’s already happened at the end - and here’s what we’ve got coming up - hosting and where to find us:

🇬🇧 Monday 2 June: Build. Scale. Adapt. Exit.
Co-Hosted by Cooley, EDT & Partners, Oppenheimer and us during the week of SXSW London, we’ll dive into the highs, lows, and wild pivots that come with building something great. Whether you’re just sketching out your big idea or scaling up to new heights, this event is all about sharing real experience, fresh strategies, and connecting with the community of Founders, Funders and operators in this space.

Register your interest to attend here!

🇬🇧 Thursday 12 June: Aspiring Female Partners Summer Mixer
During London Tech Week, our ​Izzy Vahdati & Notion Capital’s Kirsten Meehan have teamed up with Unlock VC and Cooley to host the next edition of our Aspiring Female Partners event series. If you are a Female VC, please register your interest now to join us for an evening of invaluable insights from a leading female founder in the tech industry (to be announced soon!), followed by the opportunity to connect with like-minded females in the venture-capital and tech space over some drinks & canapés!

🇬🇧 16-20 June: London Edtech Week
We will be busy as always during London Edtech Week – hosting the, now traditional, Official Opening Reception alongside Cooley on Monday 16 June.

Register your interest to attend here, please:

On Thursday, 19 June, we are partnering with Matt Walton to offer an in-person workshop to explore the four dimensions that you need to crack to find Product-Market Fit and the common stages that you need to work through and what to focus on when. We'll bring these dimensions and stages to life with case studies of where people have done it successfully.

⚒️ Register for the Workshop Here ⚒️

And later the same day we are again joining forces with Cooley, Oppenheimer and EDT & Partners to co-host an afternoon of panels and conversations around building and growing in the Future of Learning and Work landscape - registrations to open soon.

👋🏽 Meet us at:
You can also Meet Us at several events across Europe in the coming weeks:

🗓️ 27-28 May – Founding Partner Ben attending Mashup in Malmö, Sweden 🇸🇪

🗓️ 3-6 June – Ben, David, Izzy, Ghita and Hege will be in Madrid during South Summit, including Ben and Izzy on Stage and Ghita hosting an oversubscribed Young VC Dinner 🇪🇸

🗓️ 11-14 June – Our Paris team will be around for Viva Technologies 🇫🇷

👀 Looking Back
It’s always fun to have people over, and there’s been a lot of activity in our London office lately. So far in May, we’ve been hosting and co-hosting 3 lovely events.

🍀 Female Founders & Funders Fun
We had the pleasure of welcoming a fab group of Female Founders and Investors in the 🔮 Future of Learning and Work space. Inspiring stories shared from both sides, leading to great connections and future partnerships. Well done 👏 for getting such an amazing crowd together, Isabella Vahdati (Brighteye) and Valérie Aelbrecht (AlbionVC & JV Investment Network)!

🍭 Investor Evening
We hosted a baby vc 🇬🇧 London dinner, enjoying the company of 25 young investors from Eurazeo, Creandum, Forestay Capital, Lakestar, True., Mouro Capital, Salica Investments, BlackFin Capital Partners, Inovia Capital & many more.

🏡 Founder Evening
Our Ground Floor was filled with Founders, as we partnered with Novabook on co-hosting an Exits Fireside Chat 🎙️ and networking evening! Pulling in the crowds was Stephen Wilks, in conversation with our Isabella Vahdati, on Founding, building and exiting, with 15M users, Seneca Learning to GoStudent, and starting again as the Founder and CEO of Novabook.

We hope you are enjoying longer days and a bit of ☀️ sunshine!

It’s been another busy month, including travels and events in several European and US cities. In between, Easter 🐣 has come and gone, we really hope you managed to squeeze in a bit of a break over the holidays. Now it’s back to work - but is the way we are working about to change completely? Check out our blog on how AI may reshape skilled corporate work below!

Thanks for reading our update, which this month includes:

• Selected News from the Portfolio – Impressive recognition for Visibly and YouSchool

• Insights – Is the future of high-skilled, corporate work fractional/ part-time?

• Events – EU-Startups Summit this week

Happy Thursday!

Best,
Team Brighteye

📣 SELECTED NEWS FROM THE PORTFOLIO

🏗️ Visibly on European Top 100 Cloud list
Big congrats to Visibly 🇬🇧 on making it onto Notion VC’s “Cloud Challengers Top 100 Report,” recently published for the fourth time, aiming “to identify the very best early stage business software start-ups in Europe.”
Visibly is rebuilding regulated training for the infrastructure sector from the ground up, focusing on competence, not classrooms, so frontline workforces get training that adapts to their individual capabilities and translates to the world around them.
Getting on this list helps recognise the team’s hard work “to give safety teams the support they actually need,” in Founder and CEO Kane’s words – well done Visibly!

🗺️ YouSchool on France’s Mapping Impact 2025
Well done, YouSchool 🇫🇷, for being included in the France Mapping Impact 2025. Done every year by France Digitale, Bpifrance Le Hub et le Mouvement Impact France, the Mapping highlights more than 1 200 startups whose core activity generates a positive, measurable and significant impact on society or the environment.
YouSchool is an online school for regulated blue-collar service industries. Being on this list of startups in impact is a great recognition of their commitment to inclusion, the digitalisation of learning, and social innovation.

🔎 INSIGHTS

✂️ Is the future of high-skilled, corporate work fractional/part-time?
In this recent blog, Rhys Spence thought about how AI could reshape skilled corporate work, not by replacing it, but by reconfiguring it.

A few core ideas:
🔹 AI as a force multiplier: High-skilled professionals may not be replaced, but augmented, freeing them to focus on uniquely human strengths
🔹 Rise of fractional work: As AI handles more operational load, demand for part-time, high-impact contributors could grow
🔹 Changing incentives: Professionals may seek out more flexible roles, prioritising autonomy and balance over traditional full-time positions
🔹 A new work identity: We may see a shift from company-centric careers to portfolio-based careers, where individuals apply their expertise across multiple contexts
🔹 Implications for education & training: Continuous learning and adaptability will matter more than ever

This isn’t just about efficiency... it’s about rethinking the structure of skilled work itself...

👉🏻 The Full Blog 👈🏽

📊 Beyond NPS: Why evidence-led thinking matters
At Brighteye, we back ambitious founders building products that aim to drive real, measurable change. But one challenge we see time and again is demonstrating that impact, especially in a way that resonates with customers, and with investors. This is particularly true for companies in the early years, K12 and Higher Education.

In her latest guest piece on our Sidekick resource hub, Libby Hills from the Jacobs Foundation explores why relying solely on Net Promoter Score (NPS) just isn’t enough...
The real unlock? Embedding research and evidence-gathering into your strategy from day one...

💡 Highlights:
➡️ Why impact needs more than anecdotes and single metrics
➡️ How the right data, collected at the right time, can validate your mission
➡️ Practical advice for founders building in high-trust sectors like education and health

➡️ Read the Full Blog here ⬅️

If you're a startup aiming to prove value and drive outcomes, this is essential reading!

📕 The EU AI Act Uncovered - Part II
❮❮How do we regulate something as transformative, versatile, and fast-evolving as artificial intelligence without stifling the very innovation we hope to cultivate?❯❯

The EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act is set to influence the global 🌏 AI landscape - but how did it come together behind the scenes?
Across two Brighteye Sidekick guest blogs,Gabriele Mazzini, who was closely involved in the drafting and development of the Act, shares his views on how the legislation came together, where it goes too far and where it holds promise.In Part 𝟮, you can read his take on the central question he “spent a significant amount of time grappling with.”

🔗 Click image ⬇️ for the full story:

🎙️ The Sidekick Podcast - Season 1 completed
Earlier this year we proudly launched the Sidekick Podcast - where our Principal David presents a host of short recordings on building and growing your startups. The full Season 1 is now out, covering episodes on Hiring, Costcutting, M&As and crafting Investor updates - to mention a few.

🎧 Find the Full Season Here 🎧

🎪 EVENTS

Happening now and coming up…

🇪🇺 EU-Startups Summit this week
We are doing some learning & connecting at the EU-Startups Summit in Malta this week, Thursday 24 - Friday 25 April. Let our Head of Community Hege know if you’re around and free for a chat about helping people learn, work and thrive – and don’t miss our Brighteye Ventures intro on stage on Friday, 25 April!

🪑 15M Users and an Exit - Fireside chat
Join Novabook and Brighteye Ventures for an exclusive chat with Stephen Wilks, co-founder of Seneca Learning (exited) and Novabook - a second-time founder who's been there, done that, and has the stories to prove it. Stephen and his team scaled EdTech platform Seneca Learning to 15M users in just six years, resulting in an eight-figure exit with GoStudent. Discover hard-earned insights, gain practical takeaways and connect with founders in the same space.

✒️ Register interest here! 🖋️

Looking back …

🥑 Female VC Breakfast Berlin
We loved Co-hosting a Female VC Breakfast in Berlin early this month, where our Associate Isabella Vahdati partnered with Alena Redeker at Auxxo Female Catalyst Fund on inviting a group of investors to kick the day off. We’ve hosted similar events in London, with a great turnout and 💥 energy – and the Berlin one was another event full of great connections and conversations. Look out for more to come!

🇮🇹 Young VC Spritz in Rome
Early April also saw our team visiting Rome, where Ghita Targhi and Alfredo Catalano got a group of young VCs together for an informal networking session. We enjoyed connecting with the community – there will, for sure, be more of these to come, too!

💻 AI for L&D Leaders Sessions wrap
Earlier this week we hosted the final event in our AI for L&D and People Leaders, concluding a series of 4 intense Sessions designed to help understand and get practical learnings from our experts on how to integrate and make the most of AI within your organisation’s Learning & Development function. Thanks to all who have been part of making these sessions interactive and productive - write-ups to follow shortly!

🌏 VC Platform Community Global Summit
We had a productive few days at the VC Platform Community Global Summit in Miami 🌴 – where Hege from our Platform team was learning and exchanging best practices and experience around portfolio support, community, events and communications with the best crowd of 500+ Platform people from VC Funds across the world. Fantastic format, content and people!

🎓 Our Annual Minerva Visit
Getting a late March 🍃 visit from a group of Minerva University students has become a tradition at our Notting Hill office! Isabella Vahdati & Hege Tollerud spent a morning talking to the cohort from the University’s Graduate Program in Decision Analysing about working in VC and backing companies that help people learn, work and thrive. Thanks for bringing your students once again! ☀️

We hope it’s a Happy March so far!

In the middle of diving into everything AI for Corporates, we’ve been super happy to share a 🆕 investment – in a Norwegian startup changing the game on renewable energy assets. More on this news below. This week we’ve also had the pleasure of catching up with existing portfolio companies over a lovely lunch 🥖 in Paris.

We hope you’ll enjoy our update, which includes:

• Investment Update – Installer announces $4M Seed round

• Insights – AI for Corporates: Hiring, Training & Enhanced Productivity

• Events – let’s meet at ASU+GSV?

Let’s go!

Best,
The Brighteye Team 👋🏽

💰 INVESTMENT UPDATE

🆕 Installer - $4M Seed
We’re delighted to share the news of our investment in Installer - leading a $4 million Seed round in the Norwegian startup, alongside PT1, Futurum Capital, and Sondo Capital.
Installer optimises the installation and maintenance process of renewable energy assets ♻️ like EV chargers, solar panels and heat pumps. Via a data-driven, AI-enhanced platform, Installer helps speeding up climate tech adoption by seamlessly matching clients with instant access to skilled installers.
Amazing job 🌟 so far, Gunnar Windsand Sem, Kristoffer Gjerde and team – we’re excited to support you on your journey!

🗞️ The good news got some decent media coverage, too - in Tech.eu, EU-Startups, Tech Funding News, TechNews180 and Shifter (in 🇳🇴)

🔎 INSIGHTS

🏢 AI for Corporates - 3 Articles out
Our Series of articles on AI for Corporates are all live (ft 3 New Market Maps!) – and we launched it with a session at our London office last week (more on that in Events below 👇🏽).

​The 3 papers are focused on AI for Hiring, Training and Enhancing Productivity:

📌 AI for Hiring looks at how AI is transforming talent acquisition and onboarding. Some topics you can explore further in the first write-up:
- AI’s role in identifying and assessing talent
- AI-powered screening and bias reduction
- AI in Onboarding, including Early Productivity

📌 In “AI for Training - the Evolution of Corporate Training,” we explore 5 ways in which AI is transforming corporate training, examining how companies use AI to:
- Build personalised learning paths
- Automate content creation
- Track performance in real-time
- Reduce training costs
- Identify future skill gaps

📌 "AI for Enhanced Productivity - Learning in the Flow of Work," the third and final article, covers the evolution of productivity in corporate environments, how AI enables:
- Automating routine tasks and reducing manual work
- Enhances decision-making
- Revolutionises collaboration and knowledge sharing
- Enhances creativity via content creation and ideation

🇪🇺 Reflections on The EU’s AI Act – by he who wrote it
The EU’s AI Act is set to influence the global AI landscape - but how did it come together behind the scenes? In this guest Article ✒️ on our Brighteye Sidekick, Gabriele Mazzini, the architect of the legislation, shares his views on how the Act came together, where it goes too far and where it holds promise. If you’re in tech, policy, or investing, we think this is necessary reading...

In Part 1, we uncover:
🔹 The driving forces behind the AI Act
🔹 Key challenges in balancing innovation & regulation
🔹 What this means for startups, investors, and the future of AI in Europe

► Full Blog here ◀

🎪 EVENTS

Coming up….

🧰 AI for L&D and People Leaders Sessions

Starting tomorrow, we are excited to be preparing for the first Session of our “bootcamp-like” online sessions on AI for L&D and People Leaders. This Thursday afternoon, 27 March, we’ll be “Unlocking AI’s Potential in L&D.”

Please register now to join the call to hear ​Lavinia Mehedintu, co-founder of Offbeat, one of Europe's leading voices on leading L&D practice, Rita Azevedo, reimagining learning at Sana and formerly head of learning at Klarna, and Dr Philippa Hardman (founder at DOMs, founder at Epiphany and a Linkedin Top Voice) dive into how AI-powered tools can transform and empower you and your L&D function.

👉🏻 Sign up to Session 1 here 👈🏽

​Objectives:

• Build awareness of AI fundamentals and terminology.

• ​Understand key AI trends transforming talent and learning functions.

• ​Explore how AI aligns with L&D priorities (personalisation, scalability, talent insights).

​Key Takeaway: Awareness of AI fundamentals and a snapshot of your AI maturity.

In the coming weeks, we have 3 more Sessions:
Session 2️⃣ Exploring AI-powered solutions, with case studies (3 April)
Session 3️⃣ Building an AI-powered L&D Strategy (15 April)
Session 4️⃣ Gaining executive buy-in for your strategy (22 April)

▶️ Links to All Sessions here! ◀️

🇩🇪 Female VC Breakfast in Berlin
Next week our Associate Izzy will be in Berlin, where she’s partnering with A on Co-hosting a Female VC Breakfast. We’ve already hosted two similar events in London, with a great turnout and energy. Will we see you in Berlin on 3 April?

🙋🏼‍♀️ Register interest here! 🙋🏼‍♀️

🇺🇸 See you at ASU+GSV?
Our Founding Partner Ben Wirz is heading to San Diego for the ASU+GSV Summit on 6-9 April. Please let him know if you’d like to 🫖 catch up!!

Looking back:
March has been a busy month, with hosting events both home and away….

☕️ Amsterdam Breakfast Wrap
We had a brilliant morning ☀️ together with 60 Investors, Founders and Community friends in 🇳🇱 Amsterdam in early March – thanks to all who joined the conversations!
Co-hosted with Rubio Impact Ventures at their office - in the 🦓 Zoo – we enjoyed partnering with Dutch Edtech, DFF Ventures (Dutch Founders Fund), Endeit Capital, No Such Ventures & Peak for this breakfast.
Two inspiring talks 🎤 from Founders Marieke van Iperen (Co-founder and CEO Settly), André Haardt (Chapter) & Eugene Lubbers (Prets) - led by Ata Şenkon (Rubio) & from Maarten Engelen (DFF Ventures), Tea Elezi (Peak) and David Guérin (Brighteye) on the Investment side (below) - moderated by Jitske van Os (Dutch Edtech).

🎀 AI for Corporates Series Launch
We love having friends over, and enjoyed an evening of talking about AI for Corporates at our London office on 19 March. The event was hosted to celebrate the launch of our 3-piece Series of articles written on AI for Corporates (as shared above 👆). Head of Platform and Research Rhys shared some of the findings with the 25 attendees, followed by Olivia Elf from Sana and Ian Walker from Salesforce sharing some of their insights in a conversation with Brighteye Partner Ben.

🧩 Product for Learning Evening
It was another evening packed with energy on the ground floor as we co-hosted an evening dedicated to building 🏗️ learning products. Matt Walton at Product for Learning brought Geoff Stead (ex Babbel & MyTutor.co.uk) and we filled the space with talk about creating healthy habits and product-led growth for learning.

Thanks to all involved, and great group 📸 selfie, Geoff – let’s do it again, soon!