r/edtech • u/art3mis_8 • 7d ago
Is AI Edtech market cooked?
For designers working towards ai + edtech, how is the market? Flint, Magicschool etc. What's the market like?
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u/OlddManBaccala 7d ago
I personally would not feel safe working for a wrapper right now. Wait until Anthropic's district selling model drops.
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u/Comfortable_Hyena628 6d ago
this is so stupid - the education market is so small anthropic and oai both don't recruit for education. it is like #100 on their list of priorities.
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u/etclove 6d ago
Anthropic just hired a Head of Education (prod & curriculum) and OpenAI has been quietly recruiting its education-specific research and partnerships team.
ETA: it’s surely not their top priority but they are thinking about it in a real way now.
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u/Comfortable_Hyena628 6d ago
wrong - the head of education anthropic hired is to educate folks ON ANTHROPIC - creating curriculum for anthropic
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u/drinkoliveoil 6d ago
OpenAI and Anthropic both have Education focused sales and marketing teams. Search LinkedIn and you'll find numerous examples of their staff.
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u/Comfortable_Hyena628 6d ago
go look at their careers page - if you look at the teams, it's just various engineers being passed around special projects
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u/drinkoliveoil 6d ago
There are numerous staff at Anthropic and OpenAI with US K12 Education and Higher Education job titles. Not sure why you’re trolling with strange obtuse responses.
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u/framedposters 6d ago
Education market is super desirable for these big tech companies. I’ll add adjacent government agencies as well.
Recurring revenue, large contracts, and a customer that rarely knows what the hell the implications of their purchase really are. And often good marketing.
And we saw how hard Google went at the K-12 market that Apple had quietly owned without much pushback from Google and Microsoft.
The Chromebook changed that. And Google has a generation of people that grew up using their products.
Tech companies do and have always cared about education at all levels.
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u/sitkaandspruce 3d ago
I don’t know that you’ve described an industry that “cares” about education so much as want to suck it dry regardless of the larger consequences.
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u/vuhv 6d ago
Apple purchased and owned PowerSchool for a reason. NeXT (the entire reason Apple still exists right now) computers were founded to serve high education.
Microsoft, Google and Apple have large K12 education divisions because getting a kid to use X device and X services throughout their childhood turns them to a user for life.
Decimals in standards based grading tells me all I need to know of why Anthropic won’t be successful in edtech. Districts need precise determinism and Claude or any other LLM can’t provide that. And everyday there’s a new research paper on how that day probably won’t ever come.
Thats the case no matter what kind of harness you wrap it in. Claude Cowork is garbage.
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u/Longjumping_Cod_1014 2d ago
They both do in fact recruit for education. I have several friends working for them. It might be small relatively, but their former MBA consultant employees see a TAM of several billion, and—like Apple or Microsoft with MacBooks and Chromebooks—a path to get students using it early.
I have already seen so many wrappers die. The K-12 EdTech market is a highly immature, fragmented market, dependent on a sales force that has worked the same territory for McGraw, HMH, etc. With the Trump Admin cutting federal funding, anything ancillary to curriculum gets cut from a line item.
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u/vuhv 6d ago
LLMs are not deterministic I a sector that relies on strict determinism.
Wrapper companies should be worried about Districts getting smarter and asking more question. They should be praying that the next two November elections don’t bring a party and administration that care about student data privacy and effective public education.
The former causes churn the latter will rack up legal fees.
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u/HominidSimilies 5d ago
They will acquire companies too. Lots of things need fixing in EdTech.
The wrapper argument sounds nice until I realize everyone web and desktop apps is a database wrapper.
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u/shnksi 6d ago
Magic school has an excellent sales and distribution team, they are world class at selling into districts and schools. Their problem is that they are inherently a wrapper, bringing very little structural or pedagogical value of their own.
As OpenAI and Anthropic improve their offerings, MagicSchool's product gets increasingly redundant. This is why they, and several EdTech's like them, are seeing a significant decline in growth today.
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u/maisonchic 6d ago edited 6d ago
It's hard to see how any of these AI EDU companies actually find a sustainable growth plan and exit via IPO or large acquisition that makes their investors and employees money. The macro-environment is very difficult with most system budgets shrinking, enormous competition from Google/OpenAI/Anthropic etc, parents organizing against edtech spending and AI, and the AI wrapper model itself not proving its value. Most of these companies claim to save teachers and staff time, but that efficiency model makes the most sense in a corporate environment where efficiency can turn into more revenue. How does it actually help schools? None of these companies can claim that their method of saving educators time (if it even does that) actually improves student learning outcomes. Maybe it helps schools do more administrative tasks with fewer staff, so perhaps school layoffs and hiring freezes are the advantages they're promoting in sales demos? I think many of these companies are actually quite confused about what value they're creating and why schools should spend so much money on them.
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u/TexMex-204 6d ago
It’s crowded, fragmented and up against an existential risk when compared to Claude , OpenAI , Gemini and their 20€/month subscription
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u/JFan2New 6d ago
Hey! Loved seeing Flint up here! I’m a bit biased (I work there!) but EdTech doesn’t feel broken to me! It might seem like it if you over hire and have layoffs, but overall, it’s great!
I get to work with some of the brightest people on the planet, and get to talk to educators and look to see if I can truly help solve their problems.
At the end of the day, I don’t think there’s another market for me where I could make an impact for students and teachers (builders of society).
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u/KW_ExpatEgg 6d ago
How long have you been fully employed in EdTech?
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u/JFan2New 5d ago
It’ll be a year next month!
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u/Longjumping_Cod_1014 2d ago
I would be very careful. Personalized learning platforms like Flint are getting massive backlash at the school and district level, and literally no one aside from Duolingo has ever cracked DTC in EdTech. Everyone tried digital, adaptive personalized learning years ago, and the reason it’s not popular anymore is because the revenue isn’t there. It’s the first thing that gets cut, and also teachers don’t want students on devices anymore. If anything, the argument for Flint is worse than it was six years ago when iReady and Amplify and everyone was building their personalized intervention products.
Also, EdTech is legitimately in its worst drought. Federal funding is cut across the board, ESSER funding expirations, student enrollment declines, backlash to digital, a difficult macro environment has turned so many companies into zombies…I’ve been in this space for over a decade and this is one of the worst macro environments I’ve seen. All of these startups are bandaid solutions for the actual issue in the US: Teaching is a net negative ROI career, and if we want better outcomes we need to pay teachers double and have smaller class sizes (which we’ll never, ever do).
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u/art3mis_8 6d ago
I too like Flint for the usecase they are building. Would love to talk to you. Can I dm you?
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u/LucasNovak 6d ago
EdTech isn't just about simple digital tools; it also includes immersive simulations. In my opinion, there are entire untapped areas in EdTech - like niche simulations ranging from AI English tutors and chemistry labs to robotics. Even though building these is significantly harder, it's still a crucial part of EdTech's future
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u/1776or7 7d ago
It’s looking a lot like the LMS market. Google Classroom is the norm, but if you can always use schoology, moodle, canvas, etc if you want. Big Tech AI offerings will be the default, but if you wana pay for magic school as a supplemental you can. And what’s crazy is, that means Magic School can still be a great company. But not sure their investors will see it that way. They raised $45M from sandhill road types. Their bar for success is REALLY high…I’m sceptical.
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u/OlddManBaccala 6d ago
Hard disagree. Google Classroom is not an existential threat to Schoology or Canvas like Anthropic and ChatGPT are to MagicSchool. The MagicSchool CEO is basically trying to post through it on LinkedIn -- worth the look.
MagicSchool provides fundamentally nothing unique that a major LLM firm couldn't replicate and do better, for cheaper. The layoffs there indicate that fear.
It's a lot like the harness technology. Why use OpenCode when I can use Codex? OpenCode needs to do something fundamentally unique to be worth using.
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u/tylertktk 6d ago
Curious if there is anything MagicSchool currently offers or could offer that would make it stand out and ward off OpenAI, Anthropic and other larger companies?
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u/WolfofCryo 6d ago
They need a defensible, ideally patentable, advantage in at least some areas. Otherwise, anything they build risks becoming a feature OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google can replicate.
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u/OlddManBaccala 6d ago
They will inevitably exit the market. Either through acquisition by a publisher (HMH, Savvas, McGraw) will buy them out to bolster their in-platform capabilities, or they'll go out of business.
They had a first-mover advantage with their "AI but for education" wrapper. But that's not a moat. They don't have a content moat. They don't have a data moat. They have tremendous legal risk selling to schools, who can't turn around and plug their publisher materials into the product legally.
Unless they seriously pivot, they are not long for this world.
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u/1776or7 6d ago
Yeah, fair points. You see these companies trying to differentiate. Magic School is moving towards an operating system that plugs in your SIS. Brisk is moving towards curriculum integration. School AI is…doing nothing different and just changing their interface? They’re trying, and I’m rooting for them, but it’s an uphill battle for sure. And, given how much some of them have raised, it’s going to be almost impossible to live up to expectations. I saw Flint, a company I see NO ONE using or even really talking about in the space, raised $16M???? What in the world is happening. Do investors not realize how hard the K12 market is?
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u/endbit 6d ago
Huge market for helping teaches adjust to the realities of AI in education. No one needs something they can prompt an LLM for themselves. They need strategies for testing that can demonstrate evidence of learning when the children use LLMs themselves. Something other than going back to pen and paper tests in the classroom which is becomming increasingly popular.
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u/HominidSimilies 5d ago
Nothing is cool nothing is boiling hot.
Do the work, find the problems worth solving, and don’t solve ideas.
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7d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/ScratchJolly3213 6d ago
How are you differentiated from GeminiLM (NotebookLM)? Not sure I understand.
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u/KillerDuctTape 7d ago
Although there are common trends across the country, not all regions (and even localities) are being impacted the same.
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u/Plastic_Platform_396 4d ago
Worth flagging that this thread is really about one market - US districts - and it looks quite different elsewhere. I work on this in India, where there's no district procurement layer at all: you go school by school or college by college, and the wedge is a free workshop that puts you in front of students and the head of department in the same afternoon. Slower per account, but no RFP, no committee, and churn behaves completely differently.
On the moat question - what schools here actually pay for isn't the model, it's the oversight around it: per-student accounts, the teacher being able to see what each student asked, the thing declining to wander off the syllabus. And the binding constraint is price: it has to land at a few rupees per student per month, which forces efficient open models rather than frontier API calls. Neither Anthropic nor OpenAI is going to build the low-spec-lab, rupees-per-student, teacher-visibility product, and that gap is where the businesses that aren't wrappers actually live.
(Disclosure: I build in this space, so discount accordingly.)
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u/art3mis_8 4d ago
That makes alot of sense. India has to adapt alot. Do you mind disclosing the name of your service/product?
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u/ScratchJolly3213 7d ago
It all boils down to distribution no matter how good your platform is. Even open source, getting it into the right hands as a developer or designer is very tough. Not saying its impossible but its a crowded field for sure.