SEA’s edtech scene down but not out

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Hello reader,

My first IT lessons at school weren’t exactly thrilling.

After we filed in on day one and took our seats in front of one of the 30 or so computers in the room, our teacher proceeded to tell us we wouldn’t be turning the machines on for months. Instead, we would be taking notes from the already outdated IT textbooks he proceeded to hand out.

Safe to say, I didn’t particularly look forward to Mr. Fulton’s classes.

Nowadays, education systems worldwide have embraced technology with much more warmth than Mr. Fulton did, luckily for the students of today. That’s part of why edtech is big business in Southeast Asia. The region’s large population and growing middle class have played a part too.

As our featured story today dives into, though, funding for edtech startups has become much harder to come by amid the tech winter and the return of offline education with the Covid-19 pandemic in the rearview mirror.

Today we look at:

• The state of edtech in Southeast Asia today
• OpenAI’s new, more powerful AI model
• Other newsy highlights such as Uber agreeing a deal to buy Foodpanda’s Taiwan business and SoftBank making a big AI push.

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Class is in session

Image credit: Timmy Loen

A lot has changed in Southeast Asian edtech since 2021, when Tech in Asia last published a landscape report on the sector.

Funding flow has slowed down amid the end of lockdown restrictions and the beginning of the tech winter, but there are still some reasons for optimism.

• By the numbers: There’s no two ways about it – there’s a lot less funding to be had. Per Tech in Asia data, in 2021, Southeast Asian edtech firms secured US$948 million in funding. The figure for 2022 and 2023 was below US$148 million, down 8.5x from the heady days of 2021.
• Green shoots: That being said, VCs still clearly believe the sector has some promising young players. Since the beginning of 2023, 71% of funding deals in the region have gone to early-stage startups. One example is Vietnamese educational content provider Vuihoc, which bagged US$6 million in a series A round in July 2023.
• Comparisons: Southeast Asia’s edtech scene is still relatively nascent, but the funding winter has also hit more mature ecosystems hard. Tech in Asia data shows Chinese edtech firms raised only US$49 million in 2023, down from US$1.8 billion two years before. The funding drop has also been precipitous in India, going from US$5.1 billion in 2022 to US$527 million in 2023.

All in one

Learn from the best: Khailee Ng, Dione Song, and more

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