More EdTech companies are changing hands, at lower prices

By the end of August 2026, Corum Group had counted 149 edtech acquisitions, and the year still had four months left to run. That total already beat Corum's previous ten-year record of 133 deals, which covered all of 2025.

The edtech surge is part of a wider rebound. Global M&A rose 40% in 2025 to $4.9 trillion, the second-highest annual deal value on record, according to Bain figures cited by FE International. Bain also surveyed more than 300 M&A executives, and 80% said they expected to hold or increase their deal activity in 2026.

Deal activity and prices are moving in opposite directions, and the institutions that run on this software feel that gap most. It decides which vendors get bought, who buys them and what the new owner plans to do next.

Cheaper typical deals, pricier big ones

The most striking number in the tracker is the median disclosed revenue multiple, which is what a buyer pays for each dollar of a target's annual revenue. Berkery Noyes' data shows it dropping to 1.3x in the first half of 2026, down from 2.3x in the second half of 2025. For a buyer, that's a good market. For a founder who raised money at 2021 prices, it's an awkward one.

Size still earns a premium. Deals above $160 million carried a median 5.9x revenue multiple in Berkery Noyes' historical sample. Deals between $10 million and $160 million carried 1.7x. According to NewMarketPitch, investors are especially interested in established platforms they can grow with further add-on purchases.

Private equity sits near the top of that range. NewMarketPitch found that financial sponsors accounted for roughly a quarter to three-tenths of recent acquisitions, depending on the dataset, yet they represented 40% of disclosed transaction value in Berkery Noyes' figures for the first nine months. A share of value well above the share of deals suggests sponsors are writing the bigger checks. That fits the platform-and-add-on strategy: pay a premium for the anchor, then buy smaller companies at today's lower multiples.

There's a limit on how hard the price story can be pushed. Only 9% of Corum's deals disclosed terms, so every headline multiple describes a thin slice of the market, and one weighted toward larger transactions.

The deal counts need care too. Corum tracks edtech acquisitions, while Berkery Noyes covers the broader education market. HolonIQ counted roughly 360 edtech transactions for 2025, concentrated in systems, infrastructure and job-aligned upskilling, against Corum's 133 for the same year. A gap that wide suggests the trackers draw the market's boundaries differently, so trends are safest read within a single dataset.

Revenue may also be the wrong measure for some targets. Larry Chu, a partner at the law firm Goodwin, argued in a GSVtv conversation with GSV Ventures' Jennifer Lee at the ASU+GSV Summit that AI has pushed startup value beyond revenue to include the quality of the team, speed of execution and proprietary data. If that view holds, a low median multiple could understate what buyers are paying for in small AI acquisitions.

Systems that are costly to replace

School administration software has become an especially attractive acquisition category. Replacing these systems is expensive and disruptive, so the customer relationships attached to them hold their value. NewMarketPitch points to Main Capital Partners' moves involving Tribal Group and Watermark Insights, whose software sits inside university admissions, student records, accreditation and institutional reporting.

Thomas Smale of FE International argued along similar lines in a May analysis. He cited two headline deals, KKR's $4.8 billion take-private of Instructure and PowerSchool's $5.6 billion sale to Bain Capital, as evidence that serious capital is after scaled learning platforms that sit inside daily workflows. In both cases, part of what the buyer is paying for is the number of years a campus or district would need to switch to another system.

More broadly, Smale sees the companies being sold as more and more often the ones with sticky enterprise contracts, defensible AI moats and learner outcomes that can be verified. He wrote that buyers now favor platforms able to show retention, persistence and outcomes, and give less credit to those that only grow their user counts. For a vendor considering a sale, renewal and retention data now matter in the price discussion, not only in the customer-success report.

The biggest combination of the year shows the arithmetic behind those larger transactions. Coursera completed its $2.5 billion all-stock combination with Udemy in May, according to FE International. NewMarketPitch reports that Coursera's revenue rose 60% from a year earlier in the second quarter of 2026, though adding Udemy accounted for most of that jump.

Without the acquisition, growth came to roughly 4%. Management, meanwhile, set a target of $115 million in yearly cost savings from combining the businesses. The gap between 60% and 4% shows the deal bought most of the headline growth, while the savings target is where the combination has to earn its keep. Combined scale and savings are common arguments for large edtech deals, and a sponsor assembling a platform through add-ons relies on the same reasoning.

This matters most to institutions whose admissions, records or learning management systems now belong to an investor that plans to keep buying. When the owner's plan is to expand through more purchases, product integration and bundling are plausible next steps. Both would show up in renewal terms before they show up anywhere else.

AI add-ons and a shorter K-12 vendor list

AI is creating acquisition targets while also putting pressure on existing education products. On the buying side, McGraw Hill, Faria and Sanoma have picked up AI-enabled teaching, analytics and tutoring capabilities, often planning to sell them through customers they already have, according to NewMarketPitch. EdWeek Market Brief's dealmaking coverage shows McGraw Hill adding Teachally, reported September 9, and TeachFX, reported September 24.

The pressure lands on standalone products that sell basic explanations or practice exercises, which now compete with general-purpose AI. Put those two forces together and the advantage seems to sit with owners that already hold the customer relationship. An AI feature sold through an existing contract doesn't have to win a district over from scratch.

Edtech is tracking a pattern seen across technology dealmaking. Bain found that close to half of all technology deals already involve AI in some way. Scope deals accounted for 60% of 2025 transactions worth $1 billion or more, the highest share on record, which means acquirers were buying capabilities and not just scale. FE International also cites PwC's 2026 technology, media and telecom outlook, which says integrated, AI-enabled platforms will be favored over content-volume plays as dealmaking enters its next phase.

Districts are pushing in the same direction. EdWeek Market Brief reported in September that the K-12 market's pendulum is swinging back from the one-off ed-tech solutions that proliferated during the pandemic, with school systems moving toward culled-down, core offerings. It made the point in a piece on IXL's expansion into assessment and core products, and in October IXL acquired NoRedInk.

The fall's K-12 deal flow, as logged by EdWeek Market Brief, shows how steady the pace has been:

• IXL acquires NoRedInk (reported October 21, 2026)
• PE-backed Activate acquires Open Up Resources; the two will operate as a combined public benefit corporation (reported October 21, 2026)
• Scholastic acquires Cottage Door Press to expand in the early childhood book market (reported October 1, 2026)
• Finalsite buys RevTrak (reported October 1, 2026)
• McGraw Hill acquires TeachFX (reported September 24, 2026)
• McGraw Hill acquires Teachally (reported September 9, 2026)

Put that next to the culling, and a district's single-purpose tool looks increasingly like either an acquisition target or a feature that ends up inside a bigger suite. For curriculum and technology directors, a vendor's ownership is now a reasonable question to ask during procurement.

Who's selling, and from where

Thin venture funding explains part of the supply. NewMarketPitch puts global edtech investment at about $20.8 billion in 2021 and $2.6 billion in 2025. HolonIQ's figure for 2025, cited by FE International, is slightly lower at $2.4 billion, spread mostly across small and mid-sized rounds that favored AI-enabled, workforce-aligned products.

Companies with paying customers but little chance of another large round may find a strategic buyer the better path. The public markets offer a narrower door: FE International counts eight education IPOs in 2025, the most in years. Set against hundreds of acquisitions, that suggests a sale remains the realistic exit for most venture-backed edtech companies.

The deals cross borders, too: 33% of Corum's recent edtech transactions were cross-border. EdWeek Market Brief's September 9 roundup, which covered McGraw Hill's Teachally purchase, also included UpGrad's acquisition of Unacademy and Abwaab's purchase of Egyptian ed-tech software provider Eduact.

Compliance and workforce training draw steady buyers

Professional certification, compliance training and school safety have also become active categories, because their products meet recurring institutional or regulatory requirements rather than discretionary consumer demand. FE International calls corporate training and workforce upskilling the single largest pool of buyer interest in edtech, which puts corporate learning teams' compliance vendors squarely in play.

Smale connects that interest to the size of the market. SkyQuest figures he cites put the global corporate training market at $444.86 billion in 2025, with a forecast of $808.89 billion by 2033, a compound annual rate of 7.76%. In his view, employers face a skills mismatch that hiring alone cannot fix, and private-equity owners tend to value exactly that kind of steady, budgeted need.

NewMarketPitch expects consolidation to keep favoring profitable software providers and specialist training companies, while warning that record deal activity should not be mistaken for a broad recovery in edtech valuations.

The next Berkery Noyes half-year tally is the number to watch. If disclosed value finally rises along with volume, valuations are recovering. If it stays near $6.5 billion while the deal count keeps climbing, consolidation is still happening at reset prices, and more of the software on campus and district contracts will change owners without much fanfare.