KKR-owned Kiwi edtech acquires Australian primary school teaching startup in $40 million deal

New Zealand digital teaching aid Education Perfect has acquired a bootstrapped Victorian edtech assessment platform Essential Assessment in a deal believed to be worth $40 million

Education Perfect (EP) saw global equity giant KKR take a majority stake in the business two years ago in a deal worth more than $400 million. The terms of the Essential Assessment (EA) acquisition were not disclosed.

EP is used by more than a million students and 50,000 teacher across 3,000 schools globally, including 2000 Australian primary schools. The edtech scaleup has more than 200 staff in New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Dubai and Toronto. It’s a digital teaching, learning and assessment toolkit for teachers that aids student engagement in online learning, and also collects and analyses student feedback.

EA began life 14 years ago in regional Victorian, developed by teacher Andrew Spitty. The platform offers assessments for schools, both online and printed, for kindergarten to year 10 students, based on the NSW, Victorian and Australian curriculums. It’s used by more than 2500 primary and secondary schools.  

The Kiwi tech company is hoping the acquisition will build out its primary school market to reach 4,000 schools and more than a million students across Australia, and make it the region’s largest edtech platform.Essential Assessment will allow the business to  bolster its position as the preferred platform for data analytics, content, and assessment capabilities for educators

Andrew Spitty, who left high school teaching in northern Victorian in 2015 to run EA full time as CEO, is the sole owner of the business, which employs more than 20 people, including his brother, who provided the developer grunt for the platform as CTO. They will both join Education Perfect, along with the rest of the team, under the deal. 

“We’ve always been dedicated to assisting primary and secondary schools in their objective to provide high-quality education, and now we have the chance to do so on a larger scale,” Spitty said.

“With our assessment capabilities combined with Education Perfect’s data analytics and content, we can offer an even more effective tool for schools to support their students.”