Dive Brief:
- Investment in the worldwide educational technology sector is breaking records this year, already having surpassed the $2.42 billion invested in the entire 2014 calendar year.
- The tally comes from Ambient Insight’s market research and only counts investment in instructional products directly related to the learning process, skipping indirectly related products and services.
- Overall investment is uneven, favoring consumer-facing products and largely skipping over those marketed to higher education institutions — a drastic shift from just five years ago.
Dive Insight:
Ambient’s research looked at investment in companies serving K-12 and higher education across 118 countries, finding major spending in China as well as growth in India and Brazil. The higher education portion of the ed tech sector is getting less attention from investors this year overall, even compared to its own performance last year. The consumer-facing tech companies may provide a more attractive investment because of the opportunities for scale. Colleges and universities do not replace software especially often, for one. Companies serving these institutions have gotten almost $100 million less in the first half of 2015 as they did during the same period in 2014.