Edtech unicorns are evolving

Hullo, it’s Alex in London. Remember education technology? There was a time when it was supposed to put universities and educational publish [View in browser]( [Bloomberg]( Hullo, it’s Alex in London. Remember education technology? There was a time when it was supposed to put universities and educational publishers out of business. But first... Three things you need to know today: - Pentagon ditched a plan to spend $2.5 billion [on Intel chip grant]( - Nvidia led semiconductor [stock rebound on Tuesday]( - Chinese smartphone pioneer Meizu is [headed for an IPO]( Learning to evolve One of the edtech industry’s pioneers, Udacity Inc., was this past week [acquired with little fanfare]( by the consulting giant Accenture Plc for an undisclosed fee. Founded by [Sebastian Thrun](, the German engineer who was an early leader of Google’s self-driving car efforts, Udacity was [valued at $1 billion]( back in 2015. By last year, India’s Economic Times reported it was valued closer to a much more modest $100 million. So what happened, how come the inelegantly titled but appealingly accessible MOOCs never took off? These massive open online courses entailed following a bunch of lectures online, sitting some tests and (if all goes well) receiving a certificate. It was supposed to be liberating and the addressable market was, well, everybody. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the main value resided in selling such courses to businesses, not the general public. That meant educating people already in the workforce, and required a solid understanding of what new skills are actually useful. Consider Coursera Inc., the most prominent survivor of that early edtech hype. It’s now a public company, with a hefty $2.3 billion valuation. Finally, 12 years after it was founded — by, incidentally, another Google veteran in Andrew Ng — it’s set to report its first profit this year, according to analyst estimates. And the enterprise business is considerably more profitable, enjoying a 68% gross margin in 2023, compared to the consumer business’s 53% margin. That’s exactly how Accenture plans to use Udacity’s platform and 230 employees: to sell courses to its large range of corporate clients that will “upskill” (read: train) their employees. Accenture’s advantage should be that it knows its clients’ requirements and can tune its offerings accordingly. That’s harder for a standalone player that isn’t deeply rooted in other parts of those companies’ operations. The key is to align courses with the needs of the market. The Accenture press release, which is full of all sorts of buzzwords (“We are passionate about helping our clients become ‘talent creators’,” Accenture CEO Julie Sweet says), places a particular emphasis on training for generative AI. Figuring out the right match between training and utility is how several business schools seem to have developed successful online courses — which they are charging top dollar for. They’re in close contact with the sort of large corporations who hire their graduates, giving them a more intimate understanding of what those businesses seek. Harvard Business School is one example. It made $74 million from online courses in fiscal 2022, the most recent year for which [data is available](. That’s more than half of what it made from the actual MBA program for which it is renowned. And it compares pretty favorably to the $524 million in (unprofitable) revenue that Coursera, whose entire business is online courses, made the same year. Having that inside edge really matters. But there’s another factor at play here. The availability of countless free courses on platforms such as Microsoft Corp.’s LinkedIn makes it tricky to charge for similar content that doesn’t carry some special qualifying cachet. Whether it’s LinkedIn or the legion of edutainers on Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube, there’s a lot of useful content on the internet that’s there just to drive engagement on social networks. That risks commoditizing the mass market consumer product, or eroding its profitability at least. Edtech isn’t dead. It’s evolved in a way that’s less about disrupting or creating an entire new industry and more about adding value to existing training systems, a supplement that both employees and employers genuinely need.—[Alex Webb](mailto:awebb25@bloomberg.net) The big story In recent years, AI software systems have grown vastly more sophisticated than their robotic counterparts. A startup called [Physical Intelligence is now working on adding high-level intelligence]( to a large range of machines and robots. One to watch Bitcoin is sustaining a record-breaking run, lifted by the unprecedented amounts of capital flowing into crypto products as well as a looming reduction in the digital token’s supply growth. Delta Blockchain Fund CEO Kavita Gupta joins Ed Ludlow on "Bloomberg Technology." 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