Is 2020 bringing more edtech rounds than ever, or does it simply feel that way?

Venture capital activity is high at the moment, making it difficult to keep up with the influx of new rounds that are being announced.

Our cup runneth over, and I would much rather be busy than bored, but not all sectors are as busy as others. We’re not drowning in consumer social rounds, for example. We are, however, seemingly suffering from a deluge of edtech investments.

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Happily for the TechCrunch crew, Natasha Mascarenhas has become our resident expert on the sector, covering it week in and week out. But even though it’s her beat, I couldn’t help but wonder this morning upon yet another large edtech round coming across the wires, just what is going on in the sector in aggregate?

I had to know. So, I’ve done a little digging into Crunchbase data, parsed through some other information and have something approaching an idea. My goal is to help us both understand if there are more edtech rounds than ever being announced, or if it simply seems that way.

Into the breach!

Edtech VC activity

The best way to start examining at a sector is to take its aggregate performance data and cut it into smaller bits. Companies do this with quarterly results, for example, an utterly arbitrary period of time to report on that is also very useful.

To get a handle on edtech in 2020, I went a bit more caveman and decided to look at the sector’s funding totals in 2020 by merely comparing the first and second half of the year.

Per Crunchbase’s “edtech” category, here’s what that data looks like:

• H1 2020: 211 rounds, $2.68 billion.
• H2 (YTD) 2020: 135 rounds, $5.25 billion.

  

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