Edtech exits are increasing, though by how much?
Before a coronavirus done edtech some-more relevant, companies in a zone were historically expected to see slow, low exits. Despite successful IPOs by 2U, Chegg and Instructure in a United States, open markets are not swarming with edtech companies.
Some of a largest exits in a space embody LinkedIn’s dip of Lynda for a $1.5 billion in money and batch and TPG’s squeeze of Ellucian for $3.5 billion.
But both of those deals happened in 2015. Five years later, edtech is cooler and surging — though is it saying exits? Are Lynda and Ellucian one-off success stories?
2U’s co-founder and CEO, Chip Paucek, pronounced he is optimistic.
“We are a singular edtech IPO,” he told TechCrunch final week. “For a prolonged time in edtech it was possibly ‘sell to Pearson or not.’”
Despite a sector’s delayed past, Paucek pronounced now is a good time to start an edtech association since a zone “is finally starting to strike a stride” with some-more back-end infrastructure and direct for online education.
This morning, let’s use some information to paint a design of a landscape of edtech exits and move some change to this stodgy stereotype.
Boot a growth
There have been approximately 225 acquisitions in edtech between 2003 and 2018, according to Crunchbase data. RS Components sent me a graph in Mar to contextualize this timeframe a bit more:

Edtech deals over time. Graph credit: RS Components.