AUTHOR: Langmár Péter, Chief Investment Officer, Co-Founder – STRT Holding
Global edtech funding is still nearly 90% below its 2021 peak, and the pandemic-era hype cycle that inflated it is not coming back. What is coming back is capital—but only for companies that spent the downturn building the unglamorous things AI cannot generate overnight: curriculum, distribution, teacher trust and years of classroom evidence. Four Hungarian-founded companies—BOOKR Kids, imagi Labs, Redmenta and Logiscool—are emerging as exactly that kind of survivor, each now backed by fresh funding, industry awards or government accreditation across dozens of countries.
Back in the time of COVID everything was different. In a few weeks, teachers, students and parents became users of digital tools because there was no alternative. Investors mistook emergency usage for permanent product–market fit. Valuations rose, weak products received money, and “the future of education” became another pitch-deck category.
Then classrooms reopened. Procurement remained slow, teachers returned to familiar workflows and many parents became less enthusiastic about more screen time. PitchBook counted the 2021 peak at 1,770 deals and estimates that global edtech funding had fallen by roughly 75% by 2023. HolonIQ uses a different methodology but reaches the same conclusion: by 2024, global edtech venture funding was 89% below the peak and at its lowest level in a decade.
The downturn has not ended. HolonIQ reports that funding in the first half of 2026 was still 26% below the same period of 2025, with stable deal volume but smaller average rounds. Yet the details show where the next market is forming: early-childhood deal count more than tripled, workforce training captured most funding, and K–12 AI personalisation continued to attract investment.
Europe shows the same selectivity. Seventy-one edtech companies raised €773 million in 2025, but the ten largest rounds absorbed 82.5% of the capital. PitchBook also found €3.4 billion of European private-equity investment in edtech by October 2024—already above the whole of 2023, although still below the €6.7 billion reached in 2021. HolonIQ counted roughly 342 edtech M&A transactions in 2024.
This is not the old market returning. Venture capital is concentrating around fewer companies, while private equity and strategic buyers consolidate established platforms. PitchBook’s broader European data points in the same direction: venture-growth was the only stage to increase its share of deal value in 2024. The databases differ on totals. They do not differ on the conclusion. Investors now want retention, distribution, institutional trust and measurable outcomes.
Generative AI makes it cheap to build an impressive education demo. It does not make it cheap to build curriculum, licensed content, learning evidence, child-safety controls, teacher trust or a distribution network across regulated education systems. Those assets take years.
Disclosure: I am Investment Director and a shareholder of STRT Invest. BOOKR Kids, imagi Labs, Redmenta and Logiscool are all in STRT’s active portfolio.
BOOKR Kids started in 2015 and spent more than a decade moving from a closed tablet product to a digital library and then to BOOKR Class, its AI-supported English-learning platform. That evolution matters. The company did not scale by attaching AI to a new interface. It first built content, pedagogy, school relationships and distribution.
According to Forbes Hungary, BOOKR Class is used in more than 200 Hungarian schools and is present in 30 countries. Between 600,000 and 700,000 children can access its roughly 2,000 English-language books, more than 90% of revenue comes from abroad, and the company reports 97% educator retention.
There is also learning evidence. BOOKR’s published research includes a 2024 national pilot with the Klebelsberg Centre and ELTE involving more than 2,200 students at over 30 public schools. An earlier national pilot reported 15–20% better reading and text-comprehension performance than print-based learning. These results deserve independent scrutiny like any company-published evidence, but they are more meaningful than downloads or screen time.
BOOKR has also crossed a less glamorous but commercially important barrier at home. BOOKR Suli is now available through Hungary’s official textbook-ordering channel: schools order the listed BOOKR Class package (code MB-87255), which includes school-wide BOOKR Suli access. In practice, the school can use the same purchasing process it uses for textbooks. In education, removing a procurement step can matter more than adding another feature.
That operating history helped BOOKR raise a €6.1 million Series A led by the 3TS syndicate. The investor’s diligence included discussions with roughly a dozen distributors and schools. The attraction was not a fashionable label. It was low churn, international distribution and an evidence-backed content asset that cannot be recreated by prompting a model for a weekend.
imagi Labs tells a different version of the same story. Founded in 2018, it began with creative coding and doubled down on US K–12 education in 2024. Its product has evolved into a supervised, curriculum-aligned layer through which schools can teach coding and AI literacy without sending children directly into unsupervised general-purpose tools.
The company reports that it has reached more than 700,000 students in 140 countries and operates across more than 100 US school districts, including the Hawaii Department of Education. It also reports 30-fold annual user growth and threefold ARR growth. These are company figures, not audited results, but they explain why the next round became possible.
In July 2026, imagi announced a €4 million-equivalent seed round led by Brighteye Ventures and Day One Capital. It has also announced partnerships with OpenAI and Lovable. The achievement is not the round alone. It is that an eight-year product journey now has a clearer institutional buyer, repeatable US distribution and a role in the emerging AI-literacy stack.
Redmenta deserves more than a footnote. Founded in Hungary in 2014, it has developed from a digital worksheet and assessment tool into an AI-supported platform for assessment, adaptive learning and competency tracking. The teacher remains the final decision-maker: AI can help create and evaluate work, but the platform is designed around classroom control rather than autonomous grading.
Redmenta says 1.5 million teachers and students have used the platform worldwide. Since June 2022, it reports supporting more than 200,000 students per month across over 70 countries. Its product now includes more than 160 AI assistants and connects with over 21 learning-management systems, including Microsoft Teams, Google Classroom, Canvas and Moodle. It can assess essays, videos, diagrams, mind maps and chatbot interactions—not only multiple-choice tests.
The external recognition is unusually relevant. Redmenta won the Bett AI in Education Award in 2024 and the Bett Innovation Award in 2025. Awards are not learning outcomes, but two consecutive wins at one of education technology’s best-known industry competitions are credible product validation.
Redmenta is also in STRT’s public active portfolio. There is no public announcement about its latest financing, so I will not discuss transaction details. The public facts are already enough: a decade of product development, meaningful international usage, integration into existing school workflows and recognition for applying AI to teacher workload and adaptive learning.
Logiscool is the most mature distribution case in this group. Founded in Hungary, it built a franchise-based coding and digital-skills network rather than an online-only course catalogue. Public transaction materials report more than 260,000 students, over 360 locations and a presence in 30 countries.
Its advantage is not a single course. It is a repeatable education system: standardised curriculum, trained instructors, local delivery and international partners. That takes longer to build than another learning app. It is also harder to copy once the network works.
Logiscool is simplifying the after-school entry point as well. Instead of asking parents of new students to choose among narrow technology labels, it now leads with one Digital Intelligence course. The beginner pathway combines online safety, AI literacy, critical thinking, digital creation, problem-solving and introductory programming across more than 30 lessons a year. The product is broader because the skill gap is broader.
The same curriculum is moving into public education. In Hungary, Logiscool’s six-hour AI module for grades 9–11 has been accredited and included in the Digital Culture subject. Economx reports that the material is already used in roughly 300 schools. Accreditation is not adoption everywhere, but it removes a barrier that previously kept an established private provider outside the formal curriculum.
Romania is going further on teacher training. A Ministry-accredited programme developed by the Foundation for Digital Education with Logiscool Romania runs for 25 hours and is open to pre-university teachers; Logiscool describes its contribution as a ten-module course on “AI-supported teaching methods for educators.” In 2026, 183,423 Romanian school staff received a 1,500-lei EU-funded teaching-career bonus, and at least 975 lei per person must be spent on accredited training. That ring-fenced pool is about 178.8 million lei—roughly €35 million—and the AI course is eligible. It would be misleading to call all €35 million “Logiscool funding.” The important point is that public money can now follow a teacher into accredited AI training.
Education is not a normal software market. Governments set curricula, control procurement, influence pricing and carry responsibility for children’s data and safety. A strong product can therefore spend years waiting for the buyer to become ready.
That buyer is becoming harder to ignore. Students already use generative AI, whether schools approve or not. The policy question has moved from “should AI enter the classroom?” to “how can it enter safely, with teachers in control?” That creates demand for proven tools rather than another generic chatbot.
The change is visible across the portfolio. imagi already works with US school districts, including the Hawaii Department of Education. BOOKR says it is in discussions with Jordan, Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates about system-level integration; in Hungary, its 2024 pilot involved the public-school operator and BOOKR Suli now sits inside the textbook-ordering channel. Logiscool’s student curriculum has entered Hungarian public education and its teacher training is accredited in Romania. Founder Dorka Horváth has also presented BOOKR Class to Hungary’s education minister and the official responsible for curriculum reform.
Accreditation is not nationwide adoption, just as a pilot, meeting or government discussion is not a procurement contract. Hungary’s fixed-price system has historically made the domestic economics of digital learning unattractive. Still, governments appear more willing to test edtech as infrastructure rather than treat it as an emergency substitute for classrooms. That is a real change, even if procurement revenue follows slowly.
The four companies are also moving from individual products to policy design. BOOKR Kids, imagi Labs, Redmenta and Logiscool, together with other industry participants and with STRT’s support, have drafted a six-pillar manifesto for integrating AI into education and plan wider consultation through Restart Hungary’s EdTech chapter. It covers student protection, learning integrity, teacher autonomy, support for teachers, Hungarian educational IP and evidence-based regulation. The group has already met the Ministry of Education; the formal announcement and consultation are still ahead. This should not become privileged procurement for four portfolio companies. The useful output would be neutral rules, accredited teacher training and measurable pilots that let schools distinguish a tested education product from a generic chatbot.
STRT’s long-term approach matters here. Education companies rarely fit the standard VC fantasy of frictionless global adoption. They grow through school years, procurement cycles, local partners, evidence and trust. Those are slow inputs. Once accumulated, they can also become defensible assets.
BOOKR and imagi have now announced public rounds worth just over €10 million combined. That does not mean STRT has made a realised return. It means independent investors were willing to finance the next stage after years of product and market development. Redmenta’s product progress and Logiscool’s curriculum accreditation point in the same direction, but they are not exits and I will not attach undisclosed transaction figures to them.
This is how a long investment horizon pays off before an exit: it preserves the option for a company to survive the unfashionable years and become investable when the market finally values what took time to build. The payoff here means external validation and renewed financing capacity—not cash returned to STRT.
The lesson is not that edtech is fashionable again. It is that the correction removed the tourists. The companies attracting capital today are often the ones that kept building when the category stopped being fashionable.
In edtech, slow adoption looks like a weakness until curriculum, distribution and institutional trust become the moat. The category is not back. The survivors are.
Disclaimer
The author of this article, Péter Langmár is the investment director and shareholder of STRT Holding Public Limited Company (hereinafter referred to as: STRT Holding). The information, opinions, analyses and views expressed in this article reflect the personal views of the author and STRT Holding’s publicly disclosed strategy and are only provided for general informational purposes. The companies named in this article are current or historical STRT portfolio companies and are included to explain investment focus, not to represent audited portfolio performance or expected returns. This article does not constitute, and is not intended to constitute, investment research or investment advice within the meaning of Act CXXXVIII of 2007 of Hungary on Investment Firms and Commodity Dealers and the Regulations Governing their Activities neither in Hungary, nor in any other jurisdiction. No information contained in this article should be construed as a recommendation, solicitation, offer or advice to acquire, dispose of or otherwise transact in any particular investment, financial instrument or other asset. The suitability or appropriateness of any investment can only be assessed in light of the individual circumstances, objectives, financial situation, knowledge and experience of the particular investor. This article does not undertake, and is not intended or suitable, to perform any such individualised assessment. In preparing this article, the author may have used unaudited data and artificial intelligence tools for research, drafting, editing, data processing, calculations or other supporting purposes. The use of such tools does not constitute a representation or guarantee that any information, analysis, calculation, source, citation or other content contained in this article is accurate, complete, current or reliable. Accordingly, to the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, the author disclaims any and all liability for any direct or indirect loss, damage, cost or expense arising out of or in connection with any investment decision made on the basis of, or in reliance upon, any information, data, opinion, analysis, calculation, source or citation contained in or otherwise made available through this article or the website on which it appears.