Pitchbook Lists Most Valuable Ed Tech Companies

Update: Jeez – sorry about the multiple typos (mistakenly showed in thousands instead of millions). Fixed now.

Pitchbook – a database service for M&A, private equity and venture capital – listed in Hot Topics what they saw as the top ten most valuable ed tech companies based on public valuations ((Note that estimates are as of the end of 2014.)). The definition of startup is a little loose, as one company (D2L) was founded in 1999 and public companies are excluded.

Below are the market valuation estimates, to which I have added the year each company was founded along with the total funding by each company in parentheses, according to Crunchbase data.

Company (year founded, funding total)  Market Valuation

1. Pluralsight (2004, $169m)            $1.0 billion
2. Instructure (2008, $79m)               $554 million
3. Lynda.com (1995, $289m)             $456 million
4. Coursera (2012, $85m)                   $367 million
5. Open English (2006, $120m)        $350 million
6. Craftsy (2010, $106m)                   $339 million
7. D2L (1999, $165m)                        $330 million
8. Lumos Labs (2005, $68m)           $265 million
9. Clever (2012, $44m)                      $247 million
10. Edmodo (2008, $88m)                 $236 million

Some notes to consider:

• 2U, not listed as they are public (I assume), is worth approximately $1.1 billion.
• Chegg, also not listed as they are public, is worth approximately $674 million.
• Lynda.com was purchased by LinkedIn this month for $1.5 billion – obviously a premium – but take the data with a grain of salt due to market variations.
• Pitchbook listed Sympoz, but I listed them as Craftsy, the company name.
• Pitchbook noted how US-centric their own list is, but this is partially due to their own data collection methods.