When it comes to global tendencies, the EdTech market is growing rapidly every year, especially in recent years due to the Covid-19 pandemic and associated restrictions. People have to study online, they have to find what to do being locked down at home, and some of them even have to find new solutions on how to earn money being unable to work as before during the “pre-covid times.” This is when all kinds of digital services—from a mobile grammar proofreader to a large online learning platform—are come in handy.
Ruslan Tymofieiev (Ruslan Tymofeev), an IT investor and the founder of venture capital fund Adventures Lab, admits that EdTech is one of the areas that he as an investor finds being the most interesting to follow and explore. Even though his native country, Ukraine, does not have much to boast yet in this direction, it seems to fill the gap soon and offer the world more “startup rock stars” like Grammarly and Preply. However, the Adventures Lab founder notes that not every local Ukrainian investor support this point of view, some remain quite still skeptical about investing in digital education.
In 2020, the investment fund Adventures Lab financed Belarusian startup EduDo. The project offers a Tik-Tok-like service that allows studying complex and difficult subjects with a series of 3-minute videos and small tests. According to Ruslan Tymofieiev, education through video is convenient, practical, and modern. Chinese media startup ByteDance has also recently started to cover this niche and upload popular science content to TikTok. According to a representative of the company, the request for this came directly from users. And that means that the demand for EdTech is not only big, but it also keeps on growing.
According to recent researches, zoomers consider education to be one of the best investments. Generation Z strives for self-development and does it pragmatically. Schools today mostly do not help students develop critical thinking, instead, they offer memorizing large amounts of information. Talking about the Ukrainian educational system, Tymofieiev admits that it requires some improvements since “there is no place for creativity, uncomfortable questions, curiosity, free-thinking.” And this is why EdTech serves more and more as a substitute for classic education.
EdTech attracts not only users but investors as well. The Market Study Report estimates the global EdTech technology market to be worth $318.8 billion, while HolonIQ experts predict the total volume of the global education market to be $7.3 trillion in three years.
Analysts from Adventures Lab always explore the niche of a startup they want to invest in. According to Ruslan Tymofieiev (Ruslan Timofeev), EdTech is a promising market that deserves attention. He believes four EdTech areas to be especially relevant in the following years:
1. Cybersecurity. Cyber scammers attack both private gadgets and large online platforms. In June 2021, educational services suffered from cyber-attacks more than 1700 times per week, especially in India, Australia, Italy, Turkey, and Israel.
2. Gamification of learning. According to Ruslan Tymofieiev (Ruslan Tymofeev), the easier you get knowledge and skills, the more attractive it is for an end-user, especially when it comes to children. That is why platforms that offer their users game-like educational programs are so popular. For instance, GIOS, a new Ukrainian startup that offers an online math course, has attracted a $400,000 investment, and only during the quarantine, the number of its users raised 10 times.
3. Individualization of education. Everyone has different abilities, talents, and levels of training. And everyone requires a different approach to the educational process. The founder of Adventures Lab exemplifies an AI-based Belgian platform Century Tech that allows analyzing students` preferences, their knowledge, and abilities and creates a customized educational program for each student.
4. VR and AR. Analysts estimate Virtual Reality to be worth more than $12 billion in 2025. As an example, Ruslan Tymofieiev mentions Historic Environment Scotland that launched virtual tours on a Late Stone Age settlement. The project allows seeing with your own eyes the lifestyle of the people at that time and the climate that affected their lives.