Brighteye Ventures, a Brighteye Ventures, a Luxembourg-based edtech venture capital firm with offices in London and Paris, announced the $54m first close of its second fund.
This brought assets under management to over $112m.
Funding came from existing and new investors, primarily international Family Offices, with a second close expected in 2021 to accommodate institutional investors.
Founded in 2017, Brighteye Ventures is a thesis-driven fund investing in startups that enhance learning and helping them expand across Europe and North America.
With the new funding, the firm will invest in 15-20 companies over the next three years at the seed and Series-A stage and write cheques up to $5m.
Brighteye Advisors, based in Paris and London, is the sole advisor to the fund. Its two partners, Alex Latsis and Benoit Wirz have been building and investing in European and North American edtech startups for over a decade.
Brighteye Ventures was an early investor in Ornikar, a large online driving school in France serving over 1.6M students, and which just expanded to Spain from France, as well as Tandem, the Berlin-based peer-to-peer language learning platform with over 10m members which recently raised a £4.5M Series A round.
The current portfolio also includes Zen Educate, a UK dynamic supply teacher platform, and Epic! a reading platform present in more than 90% of US schools.
Brighteye will be expanding its Advisory team to support the new fund and expects to grow from three members to ten within the next 12 months. David Guerin has been promoted to Principal to manage deal making and portfolio support in Paris, and the firm expects to open a DACH region presence by summer 2022.
FinSMEs
15/10/2020