Launching an Edtech Startup Accelerator

From the Edtech Tours to LearnSpace

For the last couple of years, I've been travelling the globe to find the latest Edtech innovations and shed light upon best practices in Edtech. I've been travelling for 218 days, in 15 countries, interviewed more than 450 makers and thinkers amongst them teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs, investors, public policy people, learning & development (L&D) managers etc.

I learned a lot from all of them and I'm very grateful for the time they took for me. Especially while talking to entrepreneurs, I figured that, from Santiago to Seoul they all had very similar pain points that were linked to the specificities of the education sector. Amongst them I could cite the complexity of addressing their market and education stakeholders (educators, school leaders, deans), the difficulty to understand mechanisms of learning and to design products for learning purposes.

Across the world I also got to meet wonderful educators and researchers, trying to solve similar problems. Thus, while traveling, I decided to create a global network that you could see as a giant spider web to connect people with similar goals together... and it worked! Teachers started to collaborate with startup founders, sometimes they even quit their job to join as co-founders, researchers started to collaborate with product designers to build more meaningful interactions and I thought I needed to scale this.

Connecting the dots

What we miss in Edtech is connections. Edtech startups need to work closely with education stakeholders in order to scale and make an impact. With LearnSpace I want to make those lasting connections happen. Make sure that entrepreneurs get the chance to collaborate with researchers who will give them valuable inputs on engagement and retention for example and thus bring an evidence-based approach to the fore.

But also to allow them to easily interact with educators every step of the way, as their input is more than valuable. At LearnSpace we have the chance to frequent and work with wonderful teachers: Anne-Clémence, Cédric, Bruno, Micha, Sebastian and many others... who are a true inspiration to what we're building.

Learning is a lifelong journey: to me, education & training cannot be differentiated anymore. Nowadays, learning occurs at one’s own pace, ubiquitously, independent from time, space, money thanks to the affordances of technology. LearnSpace wants to support entrepreneurs who shape the future of learning within K-12, higher education, corporate and lifelong learning as the synergies between those verticals are numerous.

The art of scaling great ideas

Up until now you could say that what we do is quite unique. But there's no secret, scaling a startup requires a lot of hard work and grit. And this is not peculiar to Edtech, although in Edtech building and scaling a startup is like running an ironman whereas in Tech it's like running a marathon (as Bernhard, the founder of Busuu once stated). This is why we want to make sure that founders at LearnSpace are mentored by successful Edtech founders, that went through a portion of this growth process and now have a couple of millions monthly active users (MAUs). Jamie Brooker (founder of one of the biggest Edtech success, Kahoot!, with 70 million MAUs) and Mathieu Nebra (founder of OpenClassrooms, one of the biggest online education platform in Europe, successfully closing the skills gap) are two such founders and LearnSpace mentors. And I am more than grateful to them for their support.

Startups have until April 8th to apply to our programme on F6S. Learn more here and spread the word! ??