The amount of venture capital flowing into K-12 education technology companies reached $642 million in 2014, jumping 32 percent over the previous year, with investors showing a strong appetite for platforms to help schools connect with parents and perform data analytics, according to a new report.
Much of the new interest in pre-college ed-tech can be linked to “a shift to more consumer-ish type products in K-12 ed-tech,” said Vivek Murali, an associate partner at the Oakland, Calif.-based NewSchools Venture Fund, which published the report last month. Mr. Murali published the analysis last month.
Venture capitalists who were previously wary of companies struggling to break into the K-12 market, he said, are now enticed by businesses that are “bypassing that cycle.”
