🌻 Dear all,
We hope you’ve had and are having a super Summer, charging and gearing up for an action-packed Q3/4. On our end, it’s already started, with an intense week at TechBBQ and full preparations ongoing for our Portfolio Summit in September.
This month’s newsletter includes:
Investment Update - Sdui bags €95M in fresh growth investment
Insights – Research tools, manufacturing & more
Events – Launching Festival Speakers
We hope you’ll enjoy!
Best,
🌻 Team Brighteye
👏 Sdui Secures €95M
Congratulations to our portfolio company Sdui, who recently announced a milestone €95M strategic growth investment led by Bain Capital Ventures’ Tech Opportunities fund - with participation from existing funders HV Capital and HTGF | High-Tech Gründerfonds.
We caught up with Founder and CEO Daniel Zacharias to get his reaction and hear his vision for what a Europe-wide 🇪🇺 operating system for schools will look like, and what benefit it brings for European students, teachers and parents.
We first backed Daniel and the Sdui team in 2021 and again in 2023 and 2024.
Our Founding Partner Benoit Wirz said:
❝European schools deserve a modern cloud-based OS that can accelerate learning by streamlining administration, data retrieval and communication. As the most comprehensive solution with broad adoption throughout the region, Sdui is the clear European leader, and we are thrilled they will have more resources to further their mission❞
You can also hear Daniel speak at our Learning + Work Festival in October – details in the Events section below👇🏽!
🏭 The $1 Trillion Manufacturing Skills Gap
Factories don’t run on machines alone. While automation is accelerating, manufacturing workers inside factories need to learn new skills. Training still happens in classrooms, knowledge walks out the door with retiring operators, and new hires are dropped into complex environments with little support.
The result is a skills gap that could cost the US economy $1 trillion 😳 by 2030. And Europe is facing the same challenge.
But a new wave of startups is stepping up, not with more slide decks, but with workflow-native tools that embed training, knowledge, and compliance directly on the factory floor. This isn’t conventional e-learning. It’s real-time enablement that reduces downtime, accelerates onboarding, and builds a future-ready workforce.
👉 In this first piece in our new Heavy Industries Series, we explore how manufacturing is being transformed by workforce enablement.
🗺️ Research Tools report + Market Map
Research is a powerful driver of progress, helping us explore and understand the unknown, build new knowledge, and solve complex problems. For decades, it has relied on rigorous, often lengthy, time-consuming processes: reviewing literature, running experiments, gathering and interpreting data, publishing and peer reviewing results. These systems have built much of the world in which we live. However, we are observing a shift in the landscape and an emergence of new tools, which have the potential to reshape the ways in which we carry out research.
We dove into this space, looking at tools in life sciences, engineering and academic research... What did we learn about opportunities in the space?
🔹 Structured, usable data remains the biggest unlock
🔹 Research infrastructure is still fragmented & ripe for verticalised reinvention
🔹 LLM-native workflows are creating new UX standards in research
🔹 AI is compressing discovery cycles, but synthesis and scale-up remain broken
🔹 Clinical trials and real-world validation are under-optimised and underserved
🔹 AI-powered literature synthesis and insight generation is becoming critical
🔹 Vertical AI startups must focus on defensible niches or infrastructure plays
The report features a market map, of course... supporting startups and the ecosystem to understand the pockets of activity.
🌟 An Exclusive on the US DoE’s Innovation Research programme
Edward Metz ran the U.S. Department of Education's Innovation Research programme for 20 years. After moving away from the role earlier this year, he ran a review of the programme with Eric Tucker from The Study Group. We feel privileged to share some of the findings.
What did the review find?
💥 The programme achieved massive scale, reaching 130.6 million users.
💥 More than half of the companies supported by the programme raised follow-on funding from investors.
💥 It achieved an impressive 9x return on public investment.
Ed and Eric shared their key takeaways for funders and policymakers:
➡️ Structured, research-based R&D leads to go-to-market strategies.
➡️ Public capital can de-risk meaningful innovation. Indeed, 75% of firms indicated their product would not exist without ED/IES SBIR funding.
➡️ Investments in concepts originated by researchers or educators pay off. While all projects were led by firms, 55% of products either originated in a university by an academic researcher or a graduate student or in a classroom by an educator.
➡️ Research and evidence are value drivers. In education, where procurement is cautious and outcomes matter, research- and evidence-backed products scale more successfully.
➡️ Companies managed to leverage public funds for next-level growth. 88% of firms reported follow-on funding after their ED/IES SBIR awards for more research and to reach scale.
👀 Access the Full Report Here 👀
🇩🇰 TechBBQ this week
The event season has already kicked off, with us joining TechBBQ in Copenhagen, and a lot of the side events this week. We started by hosting an investor lunch, getting an amazing group of investors together in a tower overlooking the wonderful Danish capital. Food, drinks and conversations helped us kick off in style – thanks to all who joined!
🇬🇧 Aspiring Females - New Event
Our Isabella Vahdati and Kirsten Meehan of Omnea are building a vibrant community for ✨ Aspiring Female Partners, and they recently announced their next event - featuring Anne Boden, Founder of Starling Bank - on Wednesday, 10 September. Anne built one of the UK’s most successful challenger banks 🏦 from the ground up, and she’s joining us in person to share the highs, the challenges, and the lessons learned along the way.
A huge thank you 🙏🏻 to Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati for hosting us - we can’t wait to fill the room with great conversations and connections.
Register your interest to attend here now – spaces are limited!
🟢 Learning + Work Festival 2025 Speakers - coming soon...
We are back hosting our annual startup Festival this October - a series of 6 online 💻 Sessions tuned in on building and growing in the Learning + Work space.
We’ll start 📢 announcing Speakers shortly – please register now to be the first to get updates on the 7-8 October events!
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