Vienna-based GoStudent has raised €300m in new funding, a sign that European edtech’s strength looks likely to continue into 2022 after a bumper 2021.

GoStudent’s Series D round was led by Prosus, with Deutsche Telekom, SoftBank, Tencent, Dragoneer, Left Lane Capital and Coatue also contributing. 

The round comes several months after GoStudent, which runs a one-to-one tutoring platform, secured its €205m Series C round. That round gave the company its unicorn status and, after the Series D, it’s now valued at €3.5bn.

European edtech companies raised €1.5bn in 2021, according to Dealroom — double their figure from 2020. The region is now home to two edtech unicorns — as well as GoStudent there’s Kahoot!, the Norwegian educational games provider. 

Before 2021, European edtech hadn’t received much attention or investment. There was an assumption that the differences in educational systems across the continent would make scaling edtechs hard, but the pandemic and a surge of interest in online learning has changed that.

“Whilst the edtech industry was definitely growing before Covid, the pandemic has certainly acted as an accelerator for both awareness around, and trust [in], online solutions,” GoStudent’s cofounder and CEO Felix Ohswald told Sifted last year.

GoStudent’s raise indicates that the uplift in interest from investors is set to continue across 2022. 

Here are the other edtechs to watch this year.

The edtech soonicorns

• Multiverse, a British startup which connects apprentices with companies, currently has a valuation of $875m, according to Dealroom, and has raised $194m so far, including a $130m round in September.
• 360Learning, a French edtech, raised $200m in October last year. The company runs a collaborative learning platform for corporate companies.
• Ornikar, also based in France, runs an online driving school. They’ve raised $171m so far.
• OpenClassrooms, another French company, has raised $149m so far (including securing backing from investors like France’s Xavier Niel). The company runs online diploma courses in French and English.

Under-the-radar edtechs to watch

We recently surveyed edtech investors on which startups they’re watching at the moment. Here are some they highlighted.

• Daisie, a UK startup working on a platform that hosts live classes run by artists, aiming to create an art school for everyone.
• Sdui, a German company which runs a secure app for students who are distance-learning to communicate with each other.
• Lepaya, a Dutch startup working on providing soft skills training for professionals.

Freya Pratty is Sifted’s news reporter. She tweets from @FPratty