EdTech Funding: A Quarter-by-Quarter Analysis

All funding deals in the EdTech market over the last years

Below is the table listing all the deals. You can find our methodology at the end of this page.

If you want a deeper understanding of the market and its current dynamics, get our report covering the EdTech Market.

Is EdTech funding actually getting stronger right now?

EdTech funding currently looks selective and uneven rather than like a market in a clean recovery.

We tracked 112 financings from April 1, 2025 through June 30, 2026. Headline capital climbed from $179.3 million in Q2 2025 to $318.7 million in Q1 2026, but the path underneath was much messier. Deal volume fell sharply in Q3, surged in Q4, stayed high in Q1 and then dropped to only nine deals in Q2 2026.

Fresh market data points in the same direction. HolonIQ estimated global EdTech venture funding at roughly $1 billion in H1 2026, down 26% year over year, while deal volume stayed relatively stable. The wider market still has investors writing checks, but they are putting less money to work overall.

Our numbers are more volatile because we use a narrower EdTech definition. Even so, the conclusion is similar: money is available today, especially for companies with clear traction, but we are not seeing the kind of broad, quarter-after-quarter acceleration that would justify calling this another EdTech funding boom.

Quarter	Deals	Capital	Capital excluding >$50M	Median round
Q2 2025	23	$179.3M	$179.3M	$3.75M
Q3 2025	16	$189.2M	$189.2M	$9.50M
Q4 2025	33	$205.7M	$205.7M	$4.06M
Q1 2026	31	$318.7M	$168.7M	$3.00M
Q2 2026	9	$42.8M	$42.8M	$3.19M

Was Q4 2025 actually the strongest EdTech funding quarter?

Q4 2025 gave us the best evidence of a genuinely broader EdTech funding market, even though Q1 2026 attracted more money.

Thirty-three companies raised during Q4, the highest deal count in the period. The three largest rounds represented only 36% of the quarter's capital, while no deal crossed $50 million. Twenty financings were below $5 million.

That mix is useful because more companies were getting funded at the same time. Capital increased only 8.7% from Q3, yet deal count more than doubled from 16 to 33. The median fell from $9.5 million to $4.06 million because the rebound was being driven by a much wider pool of smaller transactions.

Q1 looked stronger from a distance, but Q4 was the quarter when money spread furthest across the market. For anyone trying to understand where EdTech breadth really improved, Q4 is the more interesting point in the cycle.

Why did EdTech funding rise in Q3 2025 while deals were disappearing?

EdTech funding rose in Q3 2025 because investors concentrated their money into fewer, much larger rounds.

Deal count fell 30.4%, from 23 to 16, while capital still edged up 5.5%. The median financing jumped from $3.75 million to $9.5 million, the highest level across the five quarters.

Honor Education's $38 million Series A captures what was happening. EDURINO raised roughly $20 million, while Outsmart Education raised about $23.4 million. Four of the quarter's 16 deals landed between $20 million and $50 million, compared with three of 23 in Q2.

New entrants also became much less visible. Only 18.8% of Q3 deals were first financings, down from 39.1% one quarter earlier. Most of the capital was going back into companies that had already found their way into the venture market.

Q3 was a short period of bigger-ticket funding rather than a broad rush back into EdTech. Q4 went the other way almost immediately: the median dropped and smaller rounds multiplied.

Was the Q1 2026 EdTech funding boom basically just Preply?

Preply explains most of the apparent Q1 2026 EdTech funding boom.

Preply raised a $150 million Series D led by WestCap, valuing the language-learning company at $1.2 billion. That one financing represented 47.1% of the quarter's $318.7 million total.

Once rounds above $50 million are removed, Q1 falls to $168.7 million. That is 18% below Q4 rather than 55% above it. The median also slipped to $3 million, which is a strange backdrop for a market supposedly experiencing a broad surge in check sizes.

There were still serious rounds underneath Preply. Emversity raised $30 million to expand its education-to-employment model, Subject raised $28 million and Circadence closed $16.4 million as it expanded its AI-powered cyber training platform.

Those deals made Q1 active, but they do not support the idea that the whole EdTech market suddenly re-rated upward. The quarter combined one exceptional late-stage transaction with a lot of considerably smaller activity.

Company	Quarter	Category	Stage	Round
Preply	Q1 2026	Digital Tutoring Tools	Series D+	$150.0M
Yoodli	Q4 2025	Workforce Learning Software	Series B	$40.0M
Honor Education	Q3 2025	Workforce Learning Software	Series A	$38.0M
Emversity	Q1 2026	Workforce Learning Software	Series A	$30.0M
Subject	Q1 2026	School Learning Platforms	Growth Equity	$28.0M
SchoolAI	Q2 2025	School Learning Platforms	Series A	$25.0M
Outsmart Education	Q3 2025	Online Course Platforms	Unknown	$23.4M
Gizmo	Q2 2026	School Learning Platforms	Series A	$22.0M

Why did EdTech funding fall so hard in Q2 2026?

The latest EdTech funding drop came mainly from a shortage of deals rather than a collapse in normal round sizes.

Only nine financings appear in Q2 2026, down from 31 in Q1. Capital falls to $42.8 million, but the median actually moves slightly higher, from $3 million to $3.19 million.

Gizmo still managed to raise $22 million after reaching 13 million users, according to TechCrunch. That financing alone accounted for more than half of the disclosed capital in the quarter. The rest of the market was simply thin.

The wider H1 2026 figures make our Q2 collapse look unusually severe. HolonIQ found global EdTech deal volume broadly stable year over year even as capital declined. Our nine-deal quarter should therefore be read as a sharp contraction inside this specific market definition, rather than proof that global EdTech investing suddenly stopped.

For now, Q2 looks weak. We would need to see the same pattern continue before treating it as a new long-term baseline.

Are EdTech investors writing bigger checks these days?

EdTech investors are not consistently writing bigger checks today; round sizes have swung dramatically from one quarter to the next.

Q3 briefly pushed the median to $9.5 million. By Q4 it was back to $4.06 million, then $3 million in Q1 and $3.19 million in Q2 2026.

The size buckets tell the same story. Q3 had four rounds between $20 million and $50 million from just 16 deals. Q4 had only one in that range, while 20 of its 33 financings were below $5 million.

Investors have shown they can write $20 million, $30 million or $40 million checks when they like a company. The typical EdTech financing is still much smaller, though, and there is no sustained move toward bigger rounds yet.

Are new EdTech startups still getting funded?

New EdTech startups are still getting funded, although their access to capital has been erratic.

First financings represented 39.1% of Q2 2025 deals before falling below 19% in both Q3 and Q4. Then Q1 2026 changed direction: 13 of the quarter's 31 companies were receiving what our financing-history research identified as a first financing.

Those newcomers were raising fairly modest amounts. Their median round in Q1 was only $1.5 million, compared with $4.5 million for follow-on financings.

Q1 reopened the bottom of the pipeline, but most of the dollars were still flowing toward companies with previous funding. The seven follow-on financings in Q2 2026 then represented 77.8% of that quarter's deals.

Because financing histories can be incomplete for private companies, we treat this as a directional measure rather than a perfect reconstruction of every previous round. Even with that limitation, startup formation is still reaching investors. The flow just isn't stable.

Quarter	First-financing share	First-financing capital	Median first round	Follow-on share
Q2 2025	39.1%	$43.1M	$1.9M	56.5%
Q3 2025	18.8%	$22.2M	$10.0M	81.2%
Q4 2025	18.2%	$18.9M	$1.3M	81.8%
Q1 2026	41.9%	$36.5M	$1.5M	54.8%
Q2 2026	22.2%	$5.1M	$2.5M	77.8%

Is EdTech funding moving toward later-stage companies?

EdTech funding has not made a convincing move toward later-stage companies yet.

Seed and Series A deals fell from 87% of Q2 2025 financings to 55.6% in Q2 2026. That sounds like maturation until we look at the missing data: the share of deals with an unknown stage rose to 33.3% in the latest quarter.

The capital mix is even less persuasive. Later-stage companies took 63.6% of Q1 capital, heavily influenced by the quarter's largest financing. One quarter later, Seed and Series A rounds were back to 82.2% of disclosed capital.

A real late-stage shift would show up through repeated Series B, Series C and growth rounds over several quarters. We have some of those deals, but not enough of them in sequence.

Today, EdTech still looks like a market with a large early-stage base and occasional mature winners rather than one steadily moving up the venture ladder.

Is Digital Tutoring really becoming the hottest part of EdTech?

Digital Tutoring is busy right now, but its spectacular capital numbers are too dependent on one company to call it the clear funding winner.

The category accounted for 37.5% of Q3 2025 deals, so investor activity was already broad before the largest round arrived. Yet those Q3 tutoring deals attracted relatively small checks compared with the category's share of transaction volume.

Q1 2026 flipped the picture. Digital Tutoring produced 22.6% of deals but a much larger share of capital. As we saw above, Preply's Series D drove most of that difference.

The interesting part came afterward. Digital Tutoring still represented one-third of Q2 deals, even without another giant transaction. So there is genuine breadth here.

What we have not seen yet is a run of large tutoring financings across several companies. Digital Tutoring is clearly one of the active EdTech themes today, but the capital surge itself remains concentrated.

Is School Learning the most durable part of EdTech funding?

School Learning Platforms have the most consistent deal flow across our EdTech categories.

The category represented 21.7% of deals in Q2 2025, 31.2% in Q3, 39.4% in Q4, 29% in Q1 2026 and 33.3% in Q2. That is a much steadier footprint than categories that jump because of one large transaction.

The companies raising also changed from quarter to quarter. SchoolAI closed a $25 million Series A in Q2 2025. Thirteen School Learning companies raised during the much broader Q4 market. Subject then raised $28 million in Q1 2026, followed by Gizmo's $22 million Series A in Q2.

There is also a real product backdrop here. SchoolAI has been building around AI-enabled classroom personalization, while Gizmo has combined AI study tools with gamification and had grown to 13 million users by the time of its latest financing.

This is roughly what durable funding momentum looks like: repeated deal activity, different companies contributing at different moments and no requirement for one huge financing to keep the category visible.

Is Workforce Learning becoming the real EdTech funding hotspot?

Workforce Learning has developed one of the stronger multi-quarter funding stories in EdTech, especially from Q4 2025 onward.

Q3 initially gave a misleading impression because Honor Education's $38 million Series A was the category's only deal. The picture changed in Q4, when eight Workforce Learning companies raised a combined $80.9 million. Yoodli's $40 million Series B was the largest, but it sat alongside a much wider group of transactions.

Q1 then produced another eight Workforce Learning deals worth $74.2 million. Emversity raised $30 million to expand training linked directly to healthcare, hospitality, manufacturing and other employment needs, while Circadence raised $16.4 million around AI-driven cyber readiness.

External evidence fits what we are seeing. HolonIQ described workforce training as the largest EdTech category by deal volume in 2025, while its H1 2026 review again identified workforce training and development as a major destination for capital. Brighteye has gone even further, widening its European framework from traditional EdTech toward a broader "Learning & Work" market spanning skills, hiring, productivity and career mobility.

The Q2 slowdown stops the story from being perfectly clean. Still, Workforce Learning now has considerably more substance behind it than one unusually large round.

Category	Q2 2025 deal share	Q3 2025	Q4 2025	Q1 2026	Q2 2026
School Learning Platforms	21.7%	31.2%	39.4%	29.0%	33.3%
Digital Tutoring Tools	17.4%	37.5%	21.2%	22.6%	33.3%
Workforce Learning Software	30.4%	6.2%	24.2%	25.8%	11.1%
Online Course Platforms	17.4%	18.8%	9.1%	9.7%	22.2%
Assessment Technology	13.0%	6.2%	6.1%	6.5%	0%

Is AI actually pulling more money into EdTech right now?

AI is clearly shaping where EdTech investors are putting money today, although it has not created a broad funding boom by itself.

Some of the period's better-known companies sit directly at the intersection of AI and learning. SchoolAI is building AI-assisted classroom tools. Yoodli uses AI roleplays for professional training. Gizmo uses AI to turn study material into interactive learning. Honor Education said its funding would support further expansion of its AI and personalization capabilities.

The external funding picture looks similar. HolonIQ's 2025 review said investors were favoring AI-enabled learning and products linked to employability while remaining disciplined on pricing and profitability.

There are also signs that learning is moving closer to the wider enterprise AI stack. Workday agreed in 2025 to acquire Sana for about $1.1 billion, combining Sana's AI search, agents and learning products with Workday's enterprise platform. That was an acquisition rather than a venture financing in our dataset, but it helps explain why workforce learning is attracting attention: learning software can increasingly sit inside the same workflow as knowledge management and employee productivity.

AI is helping companies get attention and, in some cases, large checks. Investors are still asking for adoption, distribution or a clear business use case alongside the technology.

Are the same investors starting to dominate EdTech funding?

EdTech funding still has a surprisingly fragmented investor base, and strategic investors have actually become less visible lately.

We identified 18 unique leads or co-leads in Q2 2025, 14 in Q3, 24 in Q4 and 24 again in Q1 2026. Repeat activity exists, but there is no small group leading the market quarter after quarter.

The biggest rounds underline that variety. WestCap led Preply. WestBridge Capital led Yoodli. Premji Invest led Emversity. Insight Partners led SchoolAI. Shine Capital led Gizmo.

Corporate and other strategic investors also became less common as the period progressed. Their participation represented 21.7% of deals in Q2 2025, 12.1% in Q4 and only 3.2% in Q1 2026, with none identified in Q2.

That decline is too uneven to call a permanent retreat, especially with so few deals in the latest quarter. For now, EdTech capital has not consolidated around either a fixed club of VC leads or a growing wave of corporate investors.

Is Europe actually getting stronger in EdTech funding?

Europe currently looks stronger in EdTech deal activity than in the size of the checks companies receive.

European companies represented 43.5% of deals in Q2 2025 and half in Q3. The share dropped to 27.3% in Q4, then climbed back to 48.4% in Q1 2026 and 66.7% in Q2.

The capital split was much less flattering in Q1. Europe produced close to half of the transactions but only 12.7% of the capital in our geographic classification, while North America captured 72.3%.

Broader European data is more encouraging than that one quarter suggests. Brighteye found that European Learning & Work venture funding more than doubled from €710 million in 2024 to €1.6 billion in 2025, with deal count rising 21%. Its H1 2026 update says funding remained resilient but became more concentrated around a smaller number of large rounds.

Our narrower EdTech sample therefore captures only part of what is happening in Europe. The region is producing plenty of fundable companies, but large checks are still unevenly distributed.

What is holding the EdTech funding market back today?

The biggest weakness in EdTech funding today is the thin middle between abundant small rounds and the occasional breakout financing.

We can see plenty of early activity. Q4 2025 produced 20 deals below $5 million, while Q1 2026 brought a renewed wave of first financings.

Large checks are possible too. The period contains rounds of $150 million, $40 million, $38 million, $30 million, $28 million and $25 million.

What appears less regularly is a deep sequence of Series B, Series C and growth rounds across many companies. Q3 briefly gave us a cluster of $20 million to $50 million financings, but that did not become the normal quarterly pattern.

That gap explains much of the strange shape of this market. Startups can still get started, and proven companies can still raise very large amounts. Building enough repeatable later-stage depth between those two ends is the harder part.

What is the EdTech funding trend actually telling us?

EdTech funding currently looks alive, selective and volatile, with much clearer category momentum than market-wide momentum.

Q4 2025 gave us the broadest market of the period. Q1 2026 delivered the biggest headline total, but, as pointed out above, capital excluding rounds above $50 million was actually lower than in Q4. Q2 then exposed the other side of the market: normal-looking deal sizes combined with very little transaction volume.

School Learning has shown the most consistent breadth. Workforce Learning has built a credible multi-quarter story around employability, skills and enterprise use cases. Digital Tutoring remains active, although its largest capital spike came from a single outsized financing.

We do not yet see a stable move toward later-stage funding. Investor leadership has not concentrated around a small set of firms either, while strategic capital has lately become less common rather than more important.

The wider 2026 evidence reinforces that reading. Global EdTech capital is running below last year's pace even though deals continue to happen, while European Learning & Work funding has become more concentrated. Investors are still interested; they are simply choosing where to place meaningful amounts of money much more carefully these days.

Total dollars can give a very distorted picture of EdTech funding. Deal breadth, median round size, category depth and the gap between first financings and follow-ons tell us much more about how the market is actually changing.