Is the EdTech Market growing now?
In our EdTech market deck, you will find everything you need to understand the market
SUMMARY
Yes. The EdTech market is growing now, but the growth is concentrated in AI-assisted teaching, virtual schooling, career education, workforce training, language learning and products tied closely to measurable outcomes.
The clearest sign of recovery is not venture funding. It is the fact that several large education businesses are growing revenue, users or enrollments even while global EdTech funding remains far below its 2021 peak.
That creates an unusual market split: startup capital is still scarce, but customer demand has recovered in selected categories. EdTech has moved past the post-pandemic collapse without returning to the financing environment that created the boom.
AI is becoming a genuine new buying cycle inside education. U.S. districts are moving from experimentation toward policies, staff training and approved instructional platforms, while teachers are already using AI often enough for time-saving products to become recurring tools.
School budgets remain the main constraint. New products increasingly have to replace an existing tool, consolidate several functions or show a clear productivity gain rather than simply add another subscription to the stack.
K-12 growth is especially uneven. Virtual schooling and career-focused education are expanding, while Stride's General Education business is shrinking, showing how quickly spending is moving toward programs with a clearer access, employment or productivity outcome.
Workforce learning may be EdTech's strongest growth engine right now. AI has turned reskilling into an immediate employer problem, which makes certifications, apprenticeships, enterprise training and job-linked learning easier to justify than broad digital education products.
Consumer EdTech is also separating into winners and losers. Duolingo and Preply are growing around repeated practice, human instruction and structured progress, while Chegg shows how vulnerable answer-based businesses become when general-purpose AI makes information cheap.
The geographic picture is broader than the United States, but the categories differ by region. China is producing strong operating growth, East Asia is seeing more deal activity, and European capital looks stronger when education is widened into the broader Learning & Work market.
The market is also becoming more mature financially. Several of the strongest companies are growing profit faster than revenue, while consolidation is creating larger platforms with more distribution, data and room to spread AI investment across a wider customer base.
EdTech is therefore growing again, but it is not replaying 2021. The market is becoming more selective, more outcome-driven and more closely tied to AI, employment, teacher productivity and recurring learner engagement.
This market map, featured in our EdTech market deck, highlights top companies and startups in the EdTech market
When we say the EdTech market is growing, what should we actually measure?
The EdTech market is growing today if more learners and institutions are using education technology, more revenue is flowing through the strongest companies, and new products are creating fresh spending.
Venture funding alone gives a distorted answer. Funding tells us how investors feel about startups, while revenue, enrollments, paid users, school procurement and corporate training budgets tell us whether customers are actually buying.
Those measures currently point in different directions. Startup funding is weak. Several large education businesses are growing at double-digit rates in specific segments. AI adoption inside schools has moved well beyond experimentation. Workforce training is attracting both customers and capital. At the same time, businesses built around old forms of digital content are struggling badly.
So when we ask whether EdTech is growing now, we are really testing whether the expanding parts have become large enough to outweigh the shrinking ones. The evidence says they have, although only narrowly so far.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest EdTech market report.
Has EdTech actually recovered from the post-pandemic crash?
Partly. The EdTech market has clearly moved beyond the worst of the post-pandemic collapse, but today's market is still much smaller financially than the one investors created during 2021.
The size of the funding reset is hard to ignore. Crunchbase data compiled by Axios put global education startup funding at $19.4 billion in 2021 and only $2.77 billion in 2025. That is a fall of roughly 86%.
Yet operating results have stopped looking like a collapsing industry. Duolingo is adding paid subscribers. Pearson is growing virtual schooling and enterprise learning. Stride is expanding its career-focused education business. New Oriental finished its latest fiscal year with revenue up 15.5%. Preply reached a $1.2 billion valuation while already being EBITDA profitable, according to TechCrunch.
We see a recovery in customer demand without a return to the old funding environment. That distinction explains much of the confusion around EdTech today. Someone looking only at venture capital sees a sector that never recovered. Someone looking at the strongest operating businesses sees several categories expanding again.
As this chart shows, and as featured in our EdTech market deck, online search interest in online learning has grown significantly
Is EdTech venture funding growing again?
No. EdTech venture funding is currently running below last year's level, so investors are still treating the sector cautiously.
HolonIQ counted $1 billion of global EdTech venture funding during the first half of 2026, down 26% from $1.35 billion during the same period in 2025. Deal volume stayed roughly flat. With nearly the same number of deals absorbing $350 million less capital, the average amount invested per deal also fell by roughly a quarter.
Investors are still doing deals, but they are writing smaller checks and concentrating larger rounds in categories where the commercial case already looks clear.
Preply raised $150 million for its language-learning marketplace. Multiverse raised $70 million as it pushes deeper into AI workforce training. HolonIQ also found continued investment in AI-powered K-12 personalization and alternative credentials. Early childhood education more than tripled its 2025 deal count during the first half, while East Asian EdTech deal volume rose 37%.
The funding market looks selective rather than frozen. Money is moving toward workforce skills, AI-enabled learning and companies with visible traction, while broad enthusiasm for EdTech remains absent.
| EdTech venture funding measure | Current reading |
|---|---|
| H1 2025 global EdTech VC | $1.35B |
| H1 2026 global EdTech VC | $1.0B |
| Year-over-year change | -26% |
| Deal volume | Roughly flat |
| East Asia deal volume | +37% |
Are EdTech companies growing even while startup funding falls?
Yes. Several major EdTech businesses are growing now, and their latest results are considerably healthier than the venture-funding numbers suggest.
Duolingo's latest quarter reached $298.5 million of revenue, up 18% year over year. Daily active users increased 23% to 58.7 million, while paid subscribers rose 17% to 12.7 million.
Pearson grew group revenue 4% on an underlying basis during its latest half year. The interesting part sits underneath that headline number: Virtual Learning grew 19% and Enterprise Learning & Skills grew 7%. On reported figures, Virtual Learning added £38 million of Pearson's £57 million increase in group revenue. About two-thirds of Pearson's reported revenue increase came from one digital-schooling segment.
Stride generated $2.52 billion of fiscal-year revenue, up 4.7%, while operating income jumped 25.2%. New Oriental did even better: full-year revenue rose 15.5% to $5.66 billion and operating income increased 50.2%.
Chegg is the obvious exception. Its latest quarterly revenue fell 51% to $51.8 million. That decline is severe enough to remind us that "EdTech" now contains businesses moving in completely opposite directions.
| Company | Latest revenue growth | What is growing or shrinking |
|---|---|---|
| Duolingo | +18% | Consumer language learning |
| Pearson | +4% underlying | Virtual Learning +19% |
| Stride | +4.7% | Career Learning +15% |
| New Oriental | +15.5% full year | New education initiatives |
| Chegg | -51% | Legacy academic services |
This chart, featured in our EdTech market deck, shows annual VC investment in EdTech startups
Is AI actually creating a new EdTech market?
Yes. AI is already creating a new EdTech buying cycle inside schools, although adoption is moving faster than budgets.
CoSN surveyed 607 U.S. education technology leaders between January and March 2026. Eighty-eight percent said their districts either had or planned AI initiatives during the school year. Seventy percent were training instructional staff to use instruction-focused generative AI. Fifty-three percent had initiatives around AI productivity suites for teachers and instructional staff, while 41% were implementing AI-powered instructional platforms.
The year-over-year changes are more convincing than any single percentage. The share of districts with no generative-AI guidelines fell from 43% to 21%. Acceptable-use policies rose from 38% to 56%. New policies written specifically for AI doubled from 19% to 38%. Operational AI use climbed from 37% to 64%.
This is starting to look like institutional adoption. Schools are deciding where AI belongs, who can use it, which products are acceptable and how the technology fits into existing workflows.
Companies are forming around those workflows as well. MagicSchool says more than six million educators have signed up for its teacher-focused AI platform. Its earlier $45 million Series B followed adoption across more than 10,000 schools. HolonIQ's latest funding review also highlighted AI-enabled K-12 personalization as one of the areas still attracting capital despite the broader funding decline.
AI has given EdTech a fresh product cycle at exactly the moment the old one was losing momentum.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest EdTech market report.
Are teachers actually using AI enough to support an EdTech business?
Yes. Teacher AI use is already frequent enough to support real products, especially when those products save preparation time.
A nationally representative Gallup study of 2,232 U.S. public-school teachers found that 60% were using AI for work and 32% were using it at least weekly. Regular users estimated that AI saved them 5.9 hours a week. Across a school year, Gallup calculated that this was equivalent to about six weeks of working time.
Those hours are commercially important. Lesson preparation, adapting materials, creating assessments, giving feedback and administrative writing happen every week. A product that reliably compresses those tasks does not need teachers to believe in some distant transformation of education. It only needs to save them enough time to keep being used.
The messier part is governance. Gallup surveyed another nationally representative group of 2,069 teachers in early 2026 and found that only 18% had received formal guidance from administrators about how AI should be used at work. For one-on-one tutoring, 69% said they had received no guidance at all.
Teacher demand has moved ahead of school policy. For EdTech vendors, that creates room for growth, while also raising the bar around privacy, safety, approved workflows and integration with district systems.
This chart, featured in our EdTech market deck, shows why Duolingo is winning in EdTech
Are school budgets growing fast enough to pay for all this new EdTech?
No. School budgets are still the biggest brake on K-12 EdTech growth today.
CoSN's 2026 survey ranked "budget constraints and lack of resources" as the number-one challenge to technology implementation. Budgets have occupied the top spot in 12 of the 13 years that CoSN has asked the question, so this pressure predates the current AI wave.
The end of emergency funding has made the trade-offs harder. Forty-two percent of districts said classroom technology refresh budgets were at risk, 39% said devices were at risk and 26% were worried about their ability to purchase software licenses.
That produces a very different market from 2020, when schools suddenly needed almost any product that could help them operate remotely. Today's vendor often has to replace an existing tool, consolidate several functions or show a clear productivity gain before a district will add another subscription.
AI can still grow quickly in that environment. The growth simply comes through budget reallocation. Products that save teachers hours, reduce administrative work or combine several old tools have a much easier sales argument than another standalone classroom application.
Is K-12 EdTech growing now?
Yes, selectively. K-12 EdTech is growing fastest in virtual schooling, career-focused education and AI tools, while more traditional general education products look much weaker.
Pearson's Virtual Learning business grew revenue 19% in its latest half year as enrollment increased 15% during the spring semester. Pearson also renewed all ten long-term school contracts that came up for renewal and is expanding its virtual-school network to 46 schools across 32 U.S. states.
Stride shows the split even more clearly. Its General Education enrollment fell 2.5% and General Education revenue dropped 2.1%. Career Learning enrollment, meanwhile, increased 13.9% and Career Learning revenue rose 15%.
The arithmetic is revealing. Stride added $143.7 million of Career Learning revenue while losing $30.9 million in General Education revenue. Career Learning generated more than 100% of Stride's net revenue increase and pulled the whole company upward despite contraction elsewhere.
AI products add another layer. CoSN found that 41% of districts already have initiatives around AI instructional platforms, while teacher-focused platforms such as MagicSchool have reached millions of educators.
K-12 EdTech is growing where schools see a direct outcome: access to virtual education, preparation for jobs, teacher productivity or personalized instruction.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest EdTech market report.
| K-12 EdTech area | Latest evidence |
|---|---|
| Pearson Virtual Learning revenue | +19% |
| Pearson Virtual Learning enrollment | +15% |
| Stride General Education revenue | -2.1% |
| Stride Career Learning revenue | +15% |
| Districts with AI instructional-platform initiatives | 41% |
This chart, featured in our EdTech market deck, shows annual funding in EdTech startups
Is higher-education EdTech growing now?
A little. Higher-education EdTech is still growing, but the current pace looks modest compared with virtual schooling, consumer learning and workforce training.
Pearson's Higher Education revenue grew 2% on an underlying basis in its latest half year. Its Inclusive Access business was much stronger, growing 20% and reaching half of Pearson's core U.S. courseware business. Digital distribution is clearly still taking share inside a fairly mature market.
Coursera's last standalone quarter before completing its combination with Udemy showed a similar picture. Revenue grew 9%, with Consumer up 10% and Enterprise up 7%. Registered learners increased from 175 million to 205 million, and paid enterprise customers rose 5% to 1,729.
Enterprise net retention, however, stood at 90%. Existing customers were collectively spending less, which makes the 7% enterprise growth less impressive than the headline suggests. Coursera was adding customers faster than it was expanding spending inside the existing base.
Higher education still has plenty of digital activity. We just do not see the kind of broad acceleration that would make this part of EdTech a major growth engine right now.
Is workforce learning becoming the strongest part of EdTech?
Yes. Workforce learning is currently one of EdTech's clearest growth areas because AI has turned reskilling into an immediate problem for employers.
Stride gives us one unusually clean comparison. Career Learning revenue grew 15% while General Education revenue fell 2.1%. Within Career Learning, middle- and high-school revenue grew even faster at 19.1%.
Pearson's Enterprise Learning & Skills business grew 7%, helped by vocational qualifications and enterprise solutions. The company has also expanded AI-upskilling partnerships with large employers, including Salesforce and Adobe.
Multiverse raised $70 million at a $2.1 billion valuation earlier this year. The Financial Times reported that its revenue had reached £79.6 million for the year through March 2025, while the business recorded its first cash-positive quarter in early 2026. Multiverse has trained around 30,000 apprentices and is pushing further into AI workforce training.
The Coursera-Udemy combination takes the same trend to a much larger scale. The merged platform now reaches more than 290 million learners and 18,000 enterprise customers. The two businesses generated more than $1.5 billion of combined revenue in 2025.
Learning is increasingly being sold close to the job itself: AI skills, certifications, apprenticeships, career pathways and training embedded into workplace systems. That part of the market currently has a clearer reason to exist than a lot of traditional EdTech.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest EdTech market report.
This chart, featured in our EdTech market deck, compares the main business model options for online course platforms
Is consumer EdTech still growing?
Yes. Consumer EdTech is growing when the product gives people a reason to keep coming back or offers something generic AI cannot easily replace.
Duolingo remains the clearest example. Its latest quarterly revenue rose 18%, daily active users increased 23%, and paid subscribers grew 17%. Monthly active users reached 140.6 million.
Preply is growing through a completely different model. The company raised $150 million at a $1.2 billion valuation earlier this year after reaching EBITDA profitability. In January, Preply said its platform connected more than 100,000 tutors with learners across 180 countries. A recent Fortune profile reported that the network had reached about 150,000 tutors. The figures come from different reporting points and may use slightly different definitions, but the direction is hard to miss.
Chegg provides the counterexample. Its quarterly revenue has fallen to $51.8 million, down 51% in a year.
Consumers clearly still spend money on digital learning. The stronger products today offer repeated practice, live human instruction, credentials or structured progress. Businesses whose main value was helping students retrieve answers are having a much harder time.
Is AI killing old EdTech businesses like Chegg?
Yes, in some cases. AI is putting intense pressure on EdTech businesses that mainly sold access to explanations and answers.
Chegg is the clearest casualty. Its latest quarterly revenue fell 51%, following an already severe decline a year earlier. Academic-services traffic came under pressure as students gained access to ChatGPT, AI search results and other general-purpose tools that can explain homework questions instantly.
Chegg itself is moving toward skilling and employability. Chegg Skilling revenue actually grew 2% in the latest quarter even as total company revenue collapsed. That small positive figure is revealing: the part of Chegg closest to employment outcomes is holding up far better than the traditional academic-help business.
Other education products are benefiting from exactly the same technology shift. Duolingo is using AI to expand content production and premium features. Pearson is selling AI-skilling programs to enterprises. Teacher platforms use AI to create lessons, assessments and personalized materials.
AI is changing which parts of EdTech customers are willing to pay for. Information itself has become cheap. Structure, motivation, trusted assessment, teacher workflows, human tutoring and career outcomes still command money.
This chart, featured in our EdTech market deck, shows how revenue is distributed across customer segments in the EdTech market
Is EdTech growth happening globally or mostly in the United States?
EdTech growth is global now, although different regions are producing very different kinds of growth.
China provides the clearest operating example outside the United States. New Oriental's latest fiscal-year revenue reached $5.66 billion, up 15.5%, while operating income grew 50.2%. Its final quarter was even stronger, with revenue up 23%. New educational initiatives grew roughly 24.8% during that quarter, and the company reported about 326,000 active paid users for its intelligent learning systems and devices.
Investment activity is also shifting geographically. HolonIQ found East Asian EdTech deal volume up 37% during the first half of 2026 even as global funding fell 26%.
Europe looks stronger once we widen the lens from classic EdTech to "Learning & Work." Brighteye Ventures counted €1.4 billion invested in European Learning & Work companies during the first half of 2026, already about 88% of the €1.6 billion raised during all of 2025. More later-stage deals were completed than seed and early-stage deals.
The definition is important here. Brighteye includes skills, hiring, workforce management, professional workflows and productivity businesses alongside conventional education technology. That broader category is currently growing much faster than classic EdTech venture funding.
The geographic evidence reinforces the broader pattern: the market is expanding around skills, work, AI and specific education outcomes, while the old EdTech label captures less and less of where the activity actually sits.
Is consolidation making EdTech stronger?
Probably. EdTech consolidation is creating much larger platforms at a time when standalone companies need scale, distribution and data to compete.
Coursera completed its combination with Udemy earlier this year. The resulting company reaches more than 290 million learners, 18,000 enterprise customers and 95,000 instructors and content creators. The two businesses generated more than $1.5 billion of combined revenue in 2025.
The financial logic is unusually concrete. Coursera expects $115 million of annual run-rate cost savings within two years, with most of those savings expected during the first year.
This follows several years of large EdTech transactions involving mature platforms, including Bain's $5.6 billion acquisition of PowerSchool and the roughly $4.8 billion take-private of Instructure.
We should expect fewer large standalone platforms in some parts of EdTech. Scale helps companies spread AI investment across more users, sell more products through the same institutional relationships and combine learning data from much larger populations.
For the market as a whole, consolidation can support growth even when startup creation slows. More revenue can end up concentrated inside a smaller number of stronger platforms.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest EdTech market report.
This chart, featured in our EdTech market deck, shows how AI conversational tutor technology has evolved over time
Are EdTech companies becoming better businesses?
Yes. Some of today's strongest EdTech companies are improving profits faster than revenue, a healthier pattern than the sector showed during the funding boom.
Stride increased annual revenue 4.7%, while operating income climbed 25.2% to $450.8 million. Pearson grew underlying revenue 4% during its latest half year and adjusted operating profit 14%. Pearson's Virtual Learning profit increased 31% while revenue grew 19%.
New Oriental offers an even larger example. Annual revenue increased 15.5%, while operating income jumped 50.2% to $643.3 million. In its latest quarter, the company moved from an $8.7 million operating loss a year earlier to an $85.8 million operating profit.
The pattern is not universal. Duolingo deliberately increased investment, so its latest quarterly adjusted EBITDA fell 2% despite 18% revenue growth. Even then, the adjusted EBITDA margin remained 25.9%.
Today's EdTech market rewards companies that can combine growth with decent economics. That may produce fewer spectacular fundraising headlines, but it gives the surviving businesses a stronger base for sustained expansion.
So, is the EdTech market growing now?
Yes, but the growth is concentrated. The EdTech market is growing today across users, revenue, virtual schooling, career education, workforce training and AI adoption, while venture funding and several older business models remain weak.
The strongest evidence comes from actual customer behavior. Tens of millions more people are using large learning platforms. Virtual-school enrollment is rising. Career-focused education is taking share inside companies that also sell general education. Employers are buying AI training. U.S. school districts are moving from informal AI experimentation toward policies, training and approved platforms. Large education businesses in the U.S., Europe and China are still increasing revenue.
The weak side of the market is equally clear. As seen above, HolonIQ's latest half-year data put global EdTech venture funding at just $1 billion, down 26%. School budgets remain tight. Chegg's collapse shows what can happen when a paid education product gets commoditized by general-purpose AI. Higher-education software is growing only slowly.
We would call the current EdTech market a selective growth market. The overall direction has turned positive, but growth has migrated toward a fairly specific group of businesses: AI-assisted teaching, virtual schools, career pathways, workforce reskilling, language learning and products tied closely to measurable outcomes.
EdTech is growing again. It just looks very different from the market that boomed five years ago.
In our EdTech market deck, we identify pain points entrepreneurs should prioritize
OUR METHODOLOGY
We approached the question "Is the EdTech market growing now?" as an evidence problem rather than a market-size exercise. No single metric gives a reliable answer, so we broke the market into the dimensions that best show where activity is actually moving: venture investment, company performance, K-12, higher education, consumer learning, workforce learning, AI adoption, geographic activity, consolidation and business economics.
Within each dimension, we prioritized the freshest observable evidence available: reported revenue and profit growth, enrollments, paid users, enterprise customers, district technology initiatives, teacher usage, funding volumes, deal activity and major transactions. We gave more weight to current operating and behavioral evidence than to long-range market forecasts because the question is about what the market is doing now.
We assessed those datapoints together rather than forcing them into one blended market-growth number. Falling venture funding, rising company revenue, tight school budgets and fast AI adoption can all be true at once. The aim was to work out where growth is happening, how broad it is and whether the expanding parts are now large enough to outweigh the areas still contracting.
We also looked for confirmation across different types of evidence. Company disclosures show whether customers are paying; user and enrollment data show whether products are gaining adoption; institutional surveys show whether technology is entering real education workflows; funding data shows where investors are still willing to deploy capital; and major transactions show where scale and strategic value are accumulating.
That structured aggregation drives the final judgment. We do not require every part of EdTech to be expanding before calling the market a growth market. We require enough recent, independent evidence to show that meaningful parts of the sector are expanding in real usage and revenue, while keeping the weaker areas visible rather than averaging them away.
Key sources used for this analysis include: Axios / Crunchbase on global education startup funding, HolonIQ on H1 2026 EdTech venture funding and regional deal activity, Duolingo Investor Relations on Q2 2026 results, Pearson's results and reporting archive, Stride's FY2026 results, New Oriental's financial-results archive, Chegg's Q2 2026 results, CoSN's U.S. State of EdTech 2026, Gallup on teacher AI use and time savings, Preply on its $150 million Series D and platform scale, Multiverse on its $70 million financing round, Coursera on the completed Udemy combination, and Brighteye Ventures on H1 2026 European Learning & Work funding.
This chart, featured in our EdTech market deck, shows revenue breakdown by region across Europe, Asia, North America, Africa, and South America in the EdTech market
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