Dear all,
Happy October!
Getting to the other side of summer always means time for the Brighteye Portfolio Summit - one of our major energy boosts 🌿 of the year, getting the Family together for a couple of days. This September, Founders, Mentors, the team and a selection of guests enjoyed connecting, sharing, learning and games at the stunning Ashridge House in Hertfordshire, 🇬🇧 UK. Check out the little video at the end, to catch some of the vibe!
Below you can explore all the latest updates from us, including:
Selected News from the Portfolio – 3 Portcos on Sifted’s 250 Fastest Growing Startups
Insights – Learning + Work Festival 2025 Recordings
Events – Product For Learning and Legal Literacy Evenings
We hope you’ll enjoy!
Best,
The Brighteye Team
🏆 Three portfolio companies on Sifted 250 Fastest Growing Startups
We’re happy to see three of our portfolio companies achieving well-deserved recognition on the Sifted 250 Fastest Growing Startups in Europe. 🇪🇸 Shakers (96), 🇬🇷 Wikifarmer (106) and 🇬🇧 Zen Educate (214) all made it to the list, announced recently. Big congratulations to all, let’s go!
👏 Lynx x IBM SkillsBuild Partnership
Great new partnership launch for Lynx Educate, helping companies tackle their strategic business challenges through social impact by investing in education within their communities, and IBM SkillsBuild, a free education program aimed at increasing access to technology education. Together, they aim to reach learners across universities, schools, and frontline workplaces, providing free access to AI and digital skills, offering personalised learning paths, hands-on experience and industry-recognised credentials to help learners of all backgrounds build the skills needed for in-demand technology careers.
📹 Festival Recordings - they are all live
We had a blast hosting our annual Learning + Work Festival a few weeks ago, enjoying 7 online sessions with excellent speakers and attentive audiences. The editing of all recordings is done, you can check them out now:
Day 1 - Tuesday 7 October:
🟢 Pre-Session: Brighteye Update – Ben Wirz, Brighteye
🟢 Session 1: How Strategic Communication can help Attract Funding – Eleanor Warnock, journalist (Ex Sifted Dep Editor) & Jörn Dunker, ballou PR
🟢 Session 2: Product Market Fit – Pavlo Pedenko, Mathema (ex Wise) & Scott Eblen, Monzo Bank & Rhys Spence, Brighteye
🟢 Session 3: B2B Sales – Edward Kyei, N47, Mathieu Parin, Payfit & Frank Visciano, Ex Udemy
Day 2 - Wednesday 8 October:
🟢 Session 4: Customer Success – Jeremy Ambrose, Zendesk, Benjamin Hempel, Scandit & Andrea Spillmann-Gajek, Success Accelerators
🟢 Session 5: AI in Marketing – Lauren Crichton, Sana, Amy Spurgeon, WPP & Rhys Spence, Brighteye
🟢 Session 6: How to raise a Series A-B in 2025 – Daniel Zacharias, Sdui & Ben Wirz, Brighteye
Grab your popcorn and enjoy!!
🍎 Gen Z and the new Education Compact
A new generation is reshaping how we think about learning and work. Gen Z (and soon, Gen Alpha) are demanding change in how we learn, build careers, and define success. They’re building new compacts between learning, identity, and purpose.
In this article, our Head of Platform and Research Rhys Spence was inspired by Laura McGinnis‘ blog “Gen Z’s Reverse Flynn Effect: is it Brain Rot, AI or Just Microplastics?” - thundering through her personal and Balderton Capital‘s evolving thesis in this space.
Rhys builds on the blog’s central ideas 💡 and layers in some of our own. In short, claiming that this generation may be sketching a blueprint for the next era of learning - one in which:
🔹 Credentials are increasingly portable
🔹 Mental health is infrastructural
🔹 AI is a collaborator, not a threat
The change is already happening. And new solutions are being built. If you’re one of the 🔨 builders, we’d love to talk to you.
🎧 Sidekick Podcast: Software Is eating learning: The $3 trillion opportunity
For years, software mostly kept records: it turned filing cabinets into databases. Now, with AI, we’re moving from systems of record to systems of work with tools that do the job, not just track it. That shift matters deeply for the learning space: the education software market is roughly $200B – BUT, the labour market in education (trainers, teachers, tutors, etc.) is more than $3T! That’s where the next wave of opportunity might lie.
In this Sidekick episode, our Partner David Guérin briefly discusses this matter:
📌 The education labour market is 15x larger than the education software market
📌 The next generation of learning startups will monetise outcomes, not licences
📌 Pricing will shift from per seat to per result, think “per certification”
✏️ Mentor Article - Executive Business Reviews 101
In this recent article, our Customer Success Mentor Andrea Spillmann-Gajek formed a breakdown of how regular, strategic meetings with clients can transform relationships and outcomes.
The key takeaways:
🔑 They help you really understand the client’s goals and concerns, not just deliver what’s been asked
🔑 They force you to understand and measure value, quantitatively and qualitatively, and ensure the customer sees that value
🔑 They expose risks early, open up opportunities (new features, upsells, referrals), and keep both sides aligned on what’s next
🔑 They aren’t status-update sessions or sales pitches in disguise: EBRs are about strategy, partnership, growth
If your team isn’t doing EBRs yet, or is not doing them well ⁉️ we think this is a must-read.
Coming up…
🧩 Product For Learning Meetup
We’re excited to host another Product For Learning evening with Matt Walton at our office in a few weeks, on Wednesday, 12 November. This time we’ll hear from Lucy Stonehill, who will share insights about her BridgeU journey and how to understand the value of what you offer.
Lucy founded the university guidance platform in 2014 when such services didn’t exist. They built a market-leading position with schools and then, after being acquired by Kaplan in 2020, pivoted their business model to universities.
She’s full of insights about how to do sales-led product discovery, understand how your customers think about price and the value of what you bring. She’s also got lots of great stuff to say on the different approach you need to take to your early and late majority from your pioneering early adopters.
We have a few spots available for this in-person event, please register your interest to join here!
📎 Legal Literacy for Founders
We have teamed up with the team at law firm CMS to host an evening of practical legal matters, focused on building good contracts and structuring deals, including fundraising rounds.
Join us for this relaxed, happy-hour style session that turns legal jargon into practical moves you can use tomorrow, as well as pizza, beers and great conversations in London on Wednesday, 26 November!
Already happened…
🇳🇴 Oslo Innovation Week
We hit the Oslo ground for Oslo Innovation Week last week, with three team members busy hosting, speaking at and attending many of the total of 80+ events, big and small, across the city.
We hosted a lunch event on Thursday, 23 October, where Benoit Wirz and Isabella Vahdati shared an update on our investment thesis and approach to investing in founders building the future of learning and work. Guests at the lovely Centropa restaurant at the Oslo public library Deichman also heard from portfolio company Installer.com’s Gunnar Windsand Sem.
We also co-hosted the Investor Lounge at the must-attend 🎤 Venture Karaoke Night, and really enjoyed meeting 200 people from the Norwegian, Nordic and beyond startup ecosystem.
🎬 The Portfolio Summit video
You’ve made it here – thanks for reading. Time to check out our Portfolio Summit energy:
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