Hello!
The football World Cup is over, Wimbledon is over and the golf Open is over. For us, the biggest event that is just over is the Brighteye Founder Studio. 12 weeks of amazing inspiration, connections, energy and hard work. Last week our Founders performed the grand finale – signing out with a spectacular Demo Day show. We’ve shared a recap of the show and added some reflections on the experience from the Founders and our team below!
We wish our cohort all the best on their journeys ahead - we will be watching!
Now, we will turn to our next projects and share a general update, including:
Investment Update – sherpa’s $2.2M pre-seed
Insights – Our European Learning & Work Funding Report H1 2026
Events – The Founder Studio Demo Day
We hope you’ll enjoy our summer update – have a great rest of July!
Best,
Team Brighteye
We’re proud to be part of sherpa’s $2.2M pre-seed round - sherpa is the first agentic-native operating system for external workforce management. We’re pleased to be investing alongside Seedcamp, DN Capital, Activant Capital & many more. Rather than another system of record, sherpa’s AI agents actually run the workflows: scoping requirements, classifying worker types, sourcing and screening candidates, coordinating approvals and onboarding, monitoring delivery and spend. It sits as an invisible layer within the existing enterprise stack, no rip-and-replace required. In his write-up of “Why we invested” in sherpa, our Partner
We believe the bottleneck in the future of work is shifting from finding talent to coordinating, governing and executing external work at scale. Marketplaces solved discovery; Sherpa is building the operating infrastructure for what comes after. We are excited to back Tristan Deschler, Tim Altpeter and Maximilian Lang!
Read the full blog post on Sidekick here:
In sherpa’s own words: ❝This is base camp. The climb starts now.❞
Read their full story here!
Our European Learning & Work Funding Report H1 went live on Brighteye Sidekick this week!
The headline numbers:
🔹 €1.4bn raised across 178 deals - already closing in on all of 2025's €1.6bn (334 deals)
🔹 More ‘Late Stage’ (Series C+ deals) closed in H1 2026 than Early Stage or Seed deals
🔹 Capital is concentrating - the top 10 deals now account for ~76% of funding, up from ~55% in 2025 (though skewed by Legora's €525M round)
Back in January, our full-year report flagged a structural shift - European Edtech moving beyond its traditional boundaries, with capital increasingly converging around a broader Learning & Work stack: skills, talent, hiring, workforce management, professional workflows, and productivity.
Six months on, the H1 2026 data confirms that this shift isn't slowing down, it's accelerating.
The H1 report focus on two main threads and where they intersect:
1) Core Learning & Work - later-stage, capital-intensive, scaling fast
2) Broader Productivity - powering most of the Seed and Early-Stage activity, and where the biggest cheques (legal, HR, workforce learning, professional software) are landing on products with clear, measurable ROI
Read the full Report and listen to David Guérin and Rhys Spence break it down on this week's Sidekick FM podcast:
AI agents need certifications, just like humans. But wait... who will certify them? We are all quickly depending on AI agents as a new type of worker, or at least a new type of co-worker. The problem is that we currently have no simple way to know whether these agents are actually qualified to do the work they claim to do.
In the latest blog on Brighteye Sidekick, Partner David Guérin explores challenges and opportunities connected to the certification of AI agents, on the same level that we rely on certifications and professional qualifications for humans to create trust in jobs being properly done.
Read the full story on why “we think a new category will emerge around certification infrastructure for AI agents” here:
And, if you are a Founder building in this space – we’d like to hear from you!
What a performance Our Studio Founders pulled off at the Demo Day- the Day featured 13 brilliantly-delivered presentations within learning and work tech categories like Productivity, K12 and HE, New OS, Productivity, Talent and Languages.
We’re still smiling, reliving the moments of a room full of energy and talent, celebrating the Founder Studio Demo Day show at the HSBC Innovation Banking London HQ last Wednesday, 15 July.
We have enjoyed every moment with the Founders over the past 12 weeks and they did us proud, delivering fantastic pitches to a room filled with near 150 fans in the form of investors, customers, founders and wider community. Way to go -
A short video of the action, as well as one with first reflections on achievements from the Founders below – there’s more to follow, we promise!
The Show:
The achievement reflections:
It was great FuN to welcome the FuckUp Nights London community to an evening focused on past mistakes and failures made whilst building in the world of learning and work tech. We were all treated to two wonderfully open conversations with Loads of conversations on the floor, too, as you can see below:
The global concept of Fuckup Nights, hosting events in 300+ cities around the world, is dedicated to totally honest sharing around building enterprises, the inevitable mistakes along the way and the learnings made from them.
Coming up…
Our preparations are well underway for TechBBQ in Copenhagen in late August – where we are excited to partner with Owl Ventures to host a Grill Session on Learning & Work. Make sure to be in the room for our panel on Day 1, Wednesday 26 August - where you’ll hear from:
Bue Fisker, Director of Investments at the LEGO Foundation Investments
Kim Rants, Founder & CEO of Alice Tech (YC Combinator W25)
Isabella Vahdati, Principal, Brighteye
Kasper Hulthin, Founder & CEO of SAGA (exited Founder of Future Five)
Moderator: Victoria Longhi, Associate at Owl
See you in Denmark?
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