Edtech is on fire! | El Poder del Networking

If you’ve known me or followed me for more than 5 years, you’ll have heard me say or post this phrase at various events and on my social profiles.

In 2015 I was lucky enough to join a leading Spanish educational institution with more than 125 years of innovating, always a pioneer in the sector. I’m talking about the SEK Educational Institution.

My challenge was to set up an incubator and organise some awards, with an eye on the entrepreneurial spirit that was already in the air at its schools and at Universidad Camilo José Cela.

But seeing the size of this educational group, its classrooms 25 years ahead of everyone else’s and its super-intrapreneurial teachers, I thought we had to go one step further.

My colleague Jesus Torres, who was the group’s CTO, told me that months earlier, at the education fair in London, people had been talking about Edtech, the technologies that are transforming education, and that start-ups in this sector were coming up with very innovative solutions.

Could it be fate? … When I was working at AJE Madrid, the first 3 start-ups I mentored were in education. I was clear that start-ups in this vertical were very particular: they struggled to get into schools or universities to run a pilot, and growing in the market isn’t easy for them.

So José Luis Málaga, the father of the idea, called it SEK Lab; Jesús Torres gave it its first surname, Edtech, and I gave it the second, accelerator… and so SEK Lab Edtech Accelerator was born.

The president of SEK had bought into the idea in July 2015 when they gave her the elevator pitch 😉

For about a month I talked to several Edtech entrepreneurs at Wayra, Area31 and some sector events such as Edupreneurs, and asked them what they would want from an accelerator:

That it doesn’t take equity in my company
Top-notch mentors who know the sector
The chance to run a real pilot in schools or universities
Workshops to learn how to grow and scale

Well, all that and much more is what I included in SEK Lab’s acceleration programme, and we created a profile on F6S.com so interested start-ups could apply. Here’s our F6S link.

SEK Lab’s official launch:

We designed a pretty cool flyer explaining what we were looking for and what we offered start-ups.
We officially presented ourselves at South Summit with a stand, before we even had our logo.
We closed several collaboration agreements with Siteground, Google and Microsoft.
We were interviewed by AgoraNews and El Referente, and word started to spread.
We designed a WordPress website in barely 15 days with the terms of participation.
I sent an email campaign to my key contacts offering them the chance to be mentors or speakers at the accelerator.
We booked the Google Campus auditorium for the official presentation in December 2015, and we filled it.
Entrepreneurial alumni and entrepreneurial students took part, along with María Benjumea, president of South Summit, and in the audience there were some media outlets, interested start-ups and people from the house, SEK and UCJC.

And that’s when I shouted Edtech is on fire! for the first time, after showing a chart of the steady growth in investment in this vertical and some major acquisitions by Google and others. Data from CB Insights.

SEK Lab launch event at Google Campus, December 2015

Here’s the post I wrote on SEK Lab with more detail about the event.

In barely a month we had just over 30 start-ups interested in our acceleration programme, and it was time to bring together an external jury of experts in the field to choose the 16–18 that would give the qualifying pitch.

My good friend Nacho Villoch lent us his BBVA Innovation space, and that’s where it all really began: the first cohort of our vertical Edtech accelerator took shape.

The top-level jury: Javier Megias of Startup Xplore, Javier Arroyo of Smartick, Agustin Cuenca of APS Gems, Aurelio Jimenez of Incyde, David Vega of Lexington, Mercedes Redondo of SEK, Bernardo Martinez of Conector, Manuel Garcia of Zarpamos, Jesus Torres of SEK, Francisco Soler of CREAS Impacto, Jaime Esteban of Lanzadera, Nacho Villoch of BBVA and, of course, the main driving force behind SEK Lab, Nieves Segovia, president of the SEK Educational Institution.

After an intense event lasting almost 2 hours and hearing the pitches of the 16 finalists, the jury reached its verdict and we chose the 8 winners of the programme, one of them from abroad, from Italy.

Best of all, after 6 years we have analysed more than 300 edtech start-ups from Spain and abroad, all of them on F6S.com; we have accelerated more than 70, and a key figure is that 80% of them are still active, so they are clearly very determined entrepreneurs.

Edtech is on fire!