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Zen Educate, a marketplace that matches schools with teachers, raises $21M to fuel U.S. expansion

TechCrunch

Zen Educate , an online marketplace that algorithmically matches schools with the best available teachers, has raised £19.3 Founded out of London in 2017, Zen Educate is setting out to supplant the traditional approach to recruiting teachers, a system that typically involves third-party agencies and hefty fees. Show me the money.

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The Duolingo English Test

A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

The “incumbent provider” of English proficiency tests, Test Of English As A Foreign Language (aka TOEFL), has had all of the companies and universities who accept it locked up for many years. But in some markets, incumbency matters more than better. It is two sides of the same coin. It costs less ($49 vs $205).

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What To Do When Your Competitor Gets Funded?

Both Sides of the Table

We will have two well-funded companies educating the market on why this market opportunity for the $24 billion US storage market is ripe for disruption. And our competitors are not really each other but the incumbent businesses that have 99.9% ” In summary: The competitors are the incumbents.

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After raising $10M, Breeze breathes fresh air into a stagnant disability insurance market

TechCrunch

Breeze is reimagining these products to make them more affordable — a policy for several thousand dollars costs, on average, around $20 a month — and to provide consumer education so that purchasing this type of insurance is less intimidating, he added. “We

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The Future of Corporate Venture Capital

500

Conventional wisdom dictated that incumbents should focus their innovation efforts on R&D and growing their cash cows while investing in a few startups. In the decade since the Great Recession, we have seen digital upstarts – taking advantage of disruptive technologies from AI to IoT – reshape the economy and the corporate pecking order.

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13 investors say lifelong learning is taking edtech mainstream

TechCrunch

Given the sudden extinction of snow days and yeast shortages brought on by student bakers in the early days of the pandemic, it’s easy to see how remote education extends beyond traditional school hours. Jomayra Herrera, principal, Cowboy Ventures (a generalist fund with portfolio companies Hone and Guild Education).

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Virtual social network IMVU raises $35M from China’s NetEase and others

TechCrunch

The line between social networking and gaming is increasingly blurring , and internet incumbents are taking notice. Founded in 2005, NetEase is now known for its news portal, music streaming app, education products and video games that compete with those of Tencent. We have many shared business philosophies and complementary know-how.