Next 10 Ventures Is Prioritizing the Creator Ecosystem and Edtech

Next 10 Ventures, a new venture capital firm, recently announced an inaugural round of investments. Among the companies who will benefit are several in the edtech sector, but this is not surprising. Next 10 Ventures also recently announced a new incubator for founders in the edtech space.

Next 10 Ventures’ First Round of Minority Investments

Next 10 Venture’s first investments will fuel innovation at several companies, including GoMeta, which is a software suite designed to help people develop their own AR and VR experiences; SuperBam, which is the field of digital rights management; STAGE TEN, an innovative broadcasting platform; and AnalyzeLog, a platform designed for child and family creators.

In a press release issued on February 6, Dmitry Shapiro, Co-Founder and CEO of GoMeta and former CTO of MySpace, explained, “At GoMeta, we are focused on building next-generation creativity tools. Next 10 Ventures, with its focus on the global creator ecosystem, has been a powerful partner in these endeavors.” Shapiro also observed, “The Next 10 Ventures team has unique expertise and background that will help us bring powerful creative tools to millions of people globally.”

Shapiro is right to point out that Next 10 Ventures is not only bringing capital but also a lot of expertise to the table that seems bound to support founders and startups.

About Next 10 Ventures

Next 10 Ventures is spearheaded by Benjamin Grubbs. Previously, Grubbs served as YouTube’s Global Director of Top Creator Partnerships. Coming from YouTube, Grubbs was already familiar with the power of the creator world and how it is already being used to transform learning. With the founding of Next 10 Ventures, Grubbs hope to provide both funding and development support to individuals and teams in this context.

See here for eLearning Inside’s in-depth interview with Grubbs about Next 10’s YouTube creator incubator.

As Grubbs explained in a press release announcing Next 10 Ventures’ first round of investment:

“We set out last year to allocate capital against consumer-facing products and services we want to incubate in-house, and to invest directly into Creators via incubators and venture deals. We know Creators will continue to rely on tools and services to power their growth across the various video and social platforms. So in 2018, we made seed-stage investments to support entrepreneurs who are building companies that serve and support hundreds of thousands of creators. We are impressed with our first investment cohort’s growth to date, and are very encouraged by a strong global deal flow as we begin to seek investments for our 2019 cohort.”

Grubbs isn’t the only Next 10 Ventures’ team member with experience working in the creator ecosystem. The team consists of a mix of marketers, product managers, and education leaders from Google, eBay, Facebook, Warner Bros., Turner Broadcasting, and Disney.

EduCreator Incubator

Next 10 Ventures isn’t just investing but also supporting startups and to do so effectively, they’ve already launched two programs: the EduCreator Incubator and the iflix Southeast Asia Creators Hub. While the latter program focuses on supporting people producing video content in Southeast Asia, the EduCreator Incubator is open to edtech creators around the world. Acceptance into the incubator comes with $25,000 to $75,000 in funding.

Only creators who focus on the production of education or learning video content for digital platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, or Twitch and only those with followings of at least 750,000 views on one platform are eligible. In addition, you must be able to maintain or exceed your current upload rate for the coming 12 months.

Photo by Mimi Thian on Unsplash.