Global EdTech 1000 - 2021 Stats

Workforce and management systems together make up nearly 50% of the 2021 Global EdTech 1000

At each of our regional summits we will announce and shine a light on the most promising startups operating in the region. By the end of the summits, we start to see the full and diverse global picture of innovation and technology. The chart below shows the total global cohort of 1000 startups segmented by their ‘sub-sector’, taken from HolonIQ’s Open Source Taxonomy, the Global Learning Landscape.

Nearly one in four of the Global EdTech 1000 are focused on workforce learning and upskilling and not far behind are startups focused on management systems. Together these two sub-sectors make up nearly 50% of the Global EdTech 1000 and are heavily biased on B2B models, although a significant number of the workforce-focused startups also offer direct to consumer upskilling products and services.

Different regions of the world have different areas of focus, demand or specialization in education innovation and technology, driving variation in the regional composition by sub-sector.

While we see clear sub-sector trends that run across regions around the world, we also see outliers and over or underweight sub-sector focus compared to the global weighted average.

Australia and New Zealand is perhaps the largest outlier with 41% of the ANZ 50 focused on Management Systems, nearly double the global weighted average. Regions such as Latin America and the Caribbean, Sub Saharan Africa, Middle East and North Africa and Russia all have very high Workforce exposure, while other regions are more focused on K12 and have lower exposures to Workforce such as the Nordic Baltic and East Asia (China, Japan, Korea) region.

Globally, 6% of the Global EdTech 1000 were founded through the pandemic, and 55% founded in the four years prior. This leaves just under 40% who were formed prior to 2015.

By analyzing the founding year of the Global EdTech 1000, we can also see trends in company formation, biased of course by the fact that we are looking at the most promising startups region by region.

Interesting outliers include the Nordic Baltic region, with 12% of the 2021 cohort founded during COVID. At the other end of the spectrum Australia and New Zealand have more than 50% of the cohort founded prior to 2015, with East Asia and North America not far behind with older cohorts than the global weighted average.

Founding year patterns in the 1000 together with sub-sectors hint at category formation and growth over time. Content and Management Systems formation is declining in the cohort over time but still represents 24% in 2021. Workforce has been running strong over the prior decade, while tutoring has accelerated formation through the pandemic, as has online learning.

The two charts below show the trend in the founding year, or company formation, for the Global EdTech 1000. Left to right in both charts we see the composition of the startups founded in that range. On the left we see the formation composition by sub-sector and on the right we see the formation composition by macro region categories.

On the left we are seeing some slight compression in STEAM, Language Learning and Testing. On the right, it is more difficult to see any material patterns, other than perhaps APAC showing the largest growth in formation through the pandemic and EMEA a decline in formation share.

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30 Regional Impact Maps

Explore each of the 30 individual impact maps for the 2021 Global EdTech 1000, Global Climate Tech 1000 and Global Digital Health 1000.