Investors Remain Bullish On Social And Emotional Learning

As the youth mental health emergency continues, startups and established education companies want to build or integrate social-emotional learning into their products.

There is a lot of energy in startups around social-emotional learning (SEL) offerings, Jean Hammond, co-founder and general partner at LearnLaunch Accelerator, told Forbes. Hammond, whose accelerator has invested in more than 70 early-stage edtech companies, said she sees SEL and wellness as a major trend in the industry.

SEL relates to the nonacademic skills and attitudes that help students manage emotions, make relationships, and achieve goals. Wellness offerings in schools sometimes overlap with SEL, but go even further into social work and therapy services.

These skills underpin academic learning, but are sometimes misunderstood because aren’t measurable on a standardized test. They include hard to quantify skills like grit or self-sufficiency. In a classroom, this can look like the difference between a frustrated student opting out of a challenging lesson, versus the same student leaning into a moment of challenge until they unlock a new understanding.

In other words, SEL skills are competencies that parents, teachers, and employers know are essential qualities in successful people.

Market participants seem to agree, as M&A has remained active in SEL-focused edtech over the past year.

To name a few examples of such investment, Cartwheel Care, a mental health startup that offers telehealth services to K-12 schools, received $3.9 million in seed funding from VC firm General Catalyst in September.

Earlier in September, mental-health startup Little Otter acquired children’s wellness company Little Renegades, expanding its mental-health offerings to families with a back-to-school toolkit to help them navigate the start of the school year.

Private Equity-backed Securly, which offers cloud-based filtering safety measures to schools, acquired Rhithm in April. Rhithm platform delivers SEL lessons and videos that promote “well-being.”

And last November, edtech-giant PowerSchool, a provider of education software for school administrators, acquired Kickboard to help educators manage SEL.

As investment and M&A in the entire edtech sector looks to continue its strength, SEL deals will likely continue to factor prominently into this activity.