Partnership with Brighteye VC

Brighteye VC and WiKIT AS, have announced an exciting partnership. Brighteye Ventures is the first and largest vertical EdTech Venture Capital firm in Europe. Rhys Spence, Head of Research at Brighteye VC said:

“While recognizing that documenting impact can be immensely valuable, we also know that considerable uncertainty remains for companies looking to formalise their approaches to impact. There is currently no systematic approach for companies and funders to interrogate and intentionally improve a company’s approach to evidence. Nor is there an established method to understand whether a company’s approach effectively delivers educational outcomes for target customers and end learners. Specifically, the sector has lacked tools to demonstrate and evidence how much a product can harness or change complex learner/teacher behaviour to optimise outcomes.

With these challenges in mind, we are building a partnership with WiKIT. WiKIT has been formed by Professor Natalia Kucirkova, with the aspiration to become one of the go-to impact and evaluation partner for Edtech startups and latterly, scaleups. Unlike other public offers, WiKIT intends to cover all areas of Edtech evidence.

The WiKIT model begins with getting companies “evidence-ready” by co-developing, or independently verifying, the companies’ Logic Model, Theory of Change and Theory of Action. Relevant literature is assembled for the company’s individualized research library, with guidance on how to extrapolate from current knowledge base to the company’s intended impact.

This is then used to inform an evidence plan tailored to each company with support on what to measure and how to measure it. Updates would be made annually, with consultancy in the intervening months. This process would become increasingly sophisticated in time as the bank of impact data and measurement details crystallise.

Brighteye and WiKIT’s researchers led by Natalia Kucirkova and Olav Schewe are working in partnership to test the offer in the VC context in the hope of arriving at something promising that can be rolled out to relevant members of Brighteye’s portfolio, individual Edtech companies and other representative organisations across the sector.

We hope that this will lead to positive outcomes throughout the Edtech community. Students of all ages will be able to access high quality products that meet their needs and help them achieve the outcomes they want; Edtech companies will be able to realise their impact aspirations; and investors will be able to make fantastic returns from companies achieving great impact and penetrating a range of sectors via impactful portfolio companies”.

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