- TFN is first to report that Brighteye Ventures has secured a $72M first close for Fund III taking Europe’s most active learning and work investor to $245M in AUM.
- The fund is targeting €100M (roughly $115M) with a final close expected in the first half of 2027, and marks a deliberate move beyond edtech into what the firm calls the HumanOS: technology that helps people learn, work and adapt.
- New LPs Lumina Foundation, Zanichelli and PI Impact join the European Investment Fund, Jacobs Foundation and several European family offices, as VC funding for European learning and work startups doubles to $1.85B.
While defence and AI infrastructure is hoovering up Europe’s venture capital, edtech VC Brighteye Ventures, the London and Paris-based firm that has backed more than 50 companies in the sector since 2017, thinks the market has been looking at the wrong label.
The European firm has now secured a $72M first close for its third fund, and might be moving beyond the edtech framing a bit. Fund III will invest in the ‘HumanOS’, the layer of technology that helps people learn, work and adapt as AI makes raw intelligence abundant.
“The defining opportunity of the AI era is not replacing humans with machines. It is expanding what humans can do with machines,” said Benoit Wirz, founding partner at Brighteye. “Our conviction is that the next generation of category-defining companies will use technology to redefine human capability.”
Same fund size, earlier cheques
Fund III’s €100M target matches Fund II exactly, double the firm’s €50M debut fund, with a final close planned for the first half of 2027. “The portfolio construction is skewed slightly earlier than it did before because I think you can build more with less,” Wirz told TFN in an exclusive interview. “When you get traction early on in the AI age, it tends to accelerate much faster. We’re giving ourselves a few more shots on goal.”
In practice, more than 90% of capital goes into core cheques of $0.5M to $4M, with the remainder reserved for ‘blink’ investments of $150K to $500K into idea-stage companies. Further, Brighteye expects to make up to 35 investments from the fund.
Brighteye’s own European Learning and Work Funding Report found VC funding for the sector more than doubled from $825M in 2024 to $1.85B in 2025, matching its highest total since 2021, and companies have already raised $1.63B in the first half of 2026, on pace to nearly double again. Since inception, Brighteye’s portfolio has raised over $1B in aggregate, with multiple companies now generating more than $100M in annual revenue.
Why the pivot?
Wirz is candid that the thesis followed the companies rather than the other way round. He pointed to Uphill, a Fund II company that began as a learning platform for healthcare and organically became a productivity platform inside hospitals. “What they realised was that people didn’t need a theoretical platform to learn. What they needed was knowledge in the flow of work,” he said. “They were able to go to hospitals and say, yes, we are training you, but actually what we’re selling you is capacity.”
That shift unlocks the budget problem that has dogged corporate learning for decades. “Corporations have always paid some for training, but they’ve always been a little bit reluctant because they’re never quite sure what the return on that spend is,” Wirz noted. “Now you can say, you’re not actually just paying for learning, you’re paying for productivity.”
The value chain, as Wirz frames it, has three links: use AI to learn a skill, use AI to land a job that matches it, and use AI to be more productive in that job. “It used to be that each of those was a separate platform. Today you can build a single layer, particularly within a vertical, that does all three,” he said.
Fund III’s first three investments map neatly onto that chain: imagi, which holds exclusive agreements with leading AI app companies, including Lovable, the $13.3B vibe-coding unicorn TFN has tracked through its record rounds, to bring their tools into schools in a guardrailed, curriculum-aligned way; NEX Health Intelligence, an augmented intelligence platform for hospital infection-control teams; and Gyver, a B2B labour marketplace for electricians in Italy feeding Europe’s energy infrastructure build-out.
Asked which of the three industry categories he would back with his final cheque, Wirz rejected the premise. “It’s like asking me to choose between my children,” he said. “The whole point is that these things are merging into each other, and a lot of the value is in the intersections.”
The LP pitch
The first close brings in Lumina Foundation from the US, Italian education publisher Zanichelli and PI Impact alongside returning backers EIF and the Jacobs Foundation. Wirz said the pitch was the portfolio’s organic evolution plus track record: “We convinced them that our right to win comes from following what we’re already seeing in our portfolio.”
Alongside the fund, Brighteye has promoted David Guérin to partner, Isabella Vahdati to principal and Rhys Spence to head of platform and research, and unveiled a new brand developed with Justified Studio. The team remains evenly split between investment and platform across London and Paris, supported by an external bench of roughly 20 operator mentors.
For founders building at the intersection of AI, learning, productivity and labour infrastructure, Wirz’s filter is simple: “It’s more about the problems you’re trying to solve. Are you trying to solve learning? Are you trying to solve employment? Are you trying to solve productivity? If you have a differentiated approach that is not using AI, we’re open to that.”
