VCs eye investments in online education models
Mass High Tech, August 04, 2010
Online education is an increasingly hot sector for private investment, driven by government studies, vast potential customer bases and promises of solid exits. And whether the learning flavor is virtual world-based training, online tutor sessions or web-based full colleges, the online education space can be broken into two basic approaches — one-to-one versus one-to-many.
At Boston’s Spark Capital, partner Alex Finkelstein likes both approaches he said, although he is most bullish on the one-to-many approach. Three of Finkelstein’s four investments for Spark have been in online education or training. Altius Education Inc. of San Francisco is a post-secondary school that partners with established brick-and-mortar colleges, 5min of New York is a repository of short-form video tutorials on all sorts of subjects, and Woburn’s 8D World Inc. provides an online virtual world for English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners, mostly in Asia.
