There've been a few nine-figure acquisitions of companies that help traditional colleges expand online, with John Wiley buying deltak.edu for $220mm, and Pearson buying EmbanetCompass for $650mm, both in 2012.
Re:Silicon Valley and the Edtech Revolution
by jonbischke on Tuesday June 24, 2014 @06:55PM
(#7941223)
Sorry, should have clarified. Of the new wave of ed tech companies, there haven't been any big acquisitions. Both Embanet and deltak were founded in the 90s.
The concern lies here. The blog post references a record $509 million in ed tech financing in 2014. However, in the last 10 years I believe we have only seen two companies go public (2U and Chegg). Both trade at modest multiples to invested capital and neither is focused on the K-12 space. And those are the success stories. Other than those two, I can't think of a nine figure acquisition other Wireless Generation.
My concern is that, unless we start seeing large exits soon, we'll have a lot of investors fleeing the space similar to what happened to the "e-learning" companies in the wake of the dot com crash.
I sincerely hope that I'm wrong though. I'm a big fan of ImagineK12 and many of the companies referenced in the blog post. I'd love to see a number of IPOs and big exits which will drive more capital towards innovation in this sector.