June '25: Events Season

ht8578
Jun 18
4 min read

Hi friends,

From the midst of London Edtech Week, we are happy to share a quick update on recent activities. Including:

Selected News from the Portfolio – sAInaptic and Shakers on Impressive Lists
Insights – Anonymous Exits Pt. 06
Events – Recapping a lot of Recent Activities

We hope you’ll enjoy!

Best, The Brighteye Team 💐

---

📣 SELECTED NEWS FROM THE PORTFOLIO

🔮 sAInaptic on UK’s Most Promising list

Great to see sAInaptic, our portco using AI technology to deliver real-time, personalised, examiner-quality feedback to free text answers, on the UK’s Most Promising Early-stage Tech Startups list, published by Tech Nation. Way to go, team!

🪜 Shakers #18 on Sifted’s Top 100

Shakers, building the Operating System for High-Performance Freelancers powered by AI, smart matching, and a fully integrated platform to drive the future of work, has been ranked #18 in the Sifted 100: France & Southern Europe 2025, recognising the fastest-growing startups in the region. We are proud to support this amazing team that over the past year has grown revenue 6x, reached a community of 10,000+ freelancers, worked with 450+ companies, including Microsoft, Inditex and Telefónica, and closed a €14M Series A to scale across Europe.

---

🔎 INSIGHTS

🚪 Anonymous Exits Pt 6

In the 6th edition of our Anonymous Exits Series, we spoke to a Founder who built a fast-growing business “from a park in Brooklyn to a nationwide movement”. Founders naturally dream of building something massive in impact, scale and financial outcome. But the reality is that many founders need to secure more modest exits. These exits can still be highly successful. We wanted to shed some light on this process from a Founder's perspective. We will be doing more cases like this in the coming weeks!

👉🏻 Read the Full Blog 👈🏽

It spans:

🔹 How a personal mission turned into a scaled business

🔹 The challenges of aligning impact with scale

🔹 What it felt like to sell the company successfully amid challenging external conditions

---

🎪 EVENTS

It’s been a busy June, and as we are about to kick off the final London Edtech Week event that we are co-hosting, here’s some of what we’ve been up to.

📸 The London Edtech Week 2025 Official Opening

This Monday, we celebrated 🎉 the Official Opening of London EdTech Week with our wonderful co-hosts Cooley LLP. The Opening kicked off ⚡️ a week of activities in style, with conversations buzzing among 150+ guests in the Light Bar & Dining Backyard.

⚙️ PMF for Transformative Learning Workshop

30 attendees just left the building after our PMF workshop with Matt Walton this morning. We explored the four dimensions needed to crack in order to find product-market fit. We also covered the common stages that need to be worked through find that fit. With a very engaged group of startups, we brought these dimensions and stages to life with case studies.

☀️ Aspiring Female Summer Mixer

So inspired by the buzz of the Aspiring Female Partners Summer Mixer – co-hosted by Notion Capital's Kirsten Meehan & Brighteye’s Isabella Vahdati, in partnership with unlock VC (previously WVC:E) and Cooley LLP. A floor full of talented, young, female VCs connecting with and learning from each other, with the honest and open conversation 🎤 between Angie Ma, co-Founder of Faculty and ex-Sifted Deputy Editor Eleanor Warnock as a highlight. Great to see how this important community is growing so fast 🌱 - we are looking forward to many more of these!

🇪🇸 Madrid during South Summit

We had a few busy days in Madrid during South Summit at the beginning of the month, with team Brighteye out in force – speaking, moderating and judging at the Main event, hosting and attending a bunch of side events. This included hosting a Young VC Dinner, gathering a group of investors for a simple idea: great people, great food, no agenda. The team and friends also shared breakfast and made a few appearances on stage:

🔦 On a panel on Founder Burnout: The Hidden Challenge in Building Great Companies, alongside Amir Kaplan (ifeel), Itxaso del Palacio, PhD (Notion Capital) and Pelin Gonul Sahin (Founder Being)

🔦 Chatting about the future of the workplace with Alex Hernandez (Jobgether) and Pablo De La Hoz (zityhub)🔦 Judging the Future of Work & Talent startup pitches

We now also have Startup Royalty in our Portfolio, with team Shakers chosen by King Felipe VI of Spain as the company he wanted to visit for a 15-minute conversation on their stand.

🎞️ We managed to capture some of the action:

🌱 Build. Scale. Adapt. Exit - SXSW London side gig

As SXSW descended on London at the beginning of June, we did an afternoon full of panels diving into the complete Founder and Investor journey from sketching out your big idea to scaling 📈 up to new heights, before making an Exit. Co-Hosted at the stunning Cooley LLP HQ, alongside EDT&Partners and Oppenheimer & Co. Inc., during the week of SXSW London, we explored the highs, lows, and wild pivots that come with building something great. The key element across the sessions was building 🌟 relations, so it was all, of course, followed by networking, with spectacular views!

🏆 Best Venture Fund at EdtechX Award 2025

Oh, and last but not least, we won an Award!! Proud moment as we were presented with the EdTechX Award 2025 for Best Venture Fund 🎈 at the EdtechX Summit 2025 during London EdTech Week.

🙏🏻 A huge thank you to co-founder Kavitha Ravindran at our portfolio company sAInaptic for the nomination - it means a lot!