Every November, the market-intelligence firm HolonIQ publishes a list of the fifty EdTech companies it considers most notable in the Middle East and North Africa. The 2025 edition, dated 11 November 2025, is 44% K-12. Workforce and career services account for about 31%, post-secondary access for 20%.
Three months later the same firm published the global picture. Across every EdTech venture deal it counted worldwide in 2025, workforce training and development took 38% of deal volume and K-12 took 36%. Post-secondary took 22%, early childhood 4%. Deal volume means the number of deals, not the money inside them.
So the region's most-watched cohort of EdTech companies is concentrated in schools, and global capital has just put schools into second place. That is a divergence worth understanding before it is treated as either a warning or a signal.
These are not the same kind of number
Start with the honest caveat, because the comparison is doing more work than it should.
HolonIQ's MENA EdTech 50 is a curated list. Somebody at HolonIQ chooses which fifty companies belong on it. It is a view of what a well-informed observer thinks is interesting in the region, not a record of where money went. The global segment split, by contrast, is a count of transactions. One is editorial judgement about companies; the other is arithmetic on deals.
They are also different in scope. The cohort is fifty companies in one region. The global split covers a pool that reached $2.6 billion in 2025, an 11% recovery on 2024's $2.4 billion, which was itself the lowest annual total in a decade and 89% below the 2021 peak. That pool shrank again in the first half of 2026, to $1.0 billion, down 26% from $1.35 billion in the same half of 2025.
Two segment shares two points apart, inside a pool that has fallen by nearly nine tenths, is not a dramatic reallocation. It is a small tilt in a small market. Anybody presenting it as a global flight from K-12 is overreading it.
What makes it worth writing about anyway is that the tilt has a direction and a stated reason. Rest of World, reporting on the same collapse in April 2026, found investors prioritising "AI tools and training platforms that help companies hire, cut costs, and teach workers new skills" over general K-12. The same reporting counted roughly 10,500 EdTech companies launched in 2020 against 645 in 2025. The category did not just lose funding. It stopped being started.
What the region actually looks like
The MENA cohort moved too, and in a different direction from the money.
| Dimension | 2024 cohort | 2025 cohort |
|---|---|---|
| Saudi Arabia | Saudi + UAE combined 40% | 33% |
| Egypt | 32% | 25% |
| UAE | see above | 18% |
| K-12 | not reported as such | 44% |
| Workforce / career services | upskilling 24% | approx. 31% |
| Post-secondary access | not reported as such | 20% |
| D2C | 62% | above 50% |
| B2B | 36% | approx. 33% |
The two editions use different segment labels, so the segment rows are not strictly comparable year on year. The country rows are, and they show the centre of gravity moving from Egypt to Saudi Arabia inside twelve months.
The business-model row is the one founders should sit with. More than half the cohort still sells direct to consumers. About a third sells to institutions. In a region where the largest education budgets are public, the most-watched companies are still mostly selling to parents.
Why the K-12 bet costs more to finance
Selling to schools is not worse than selling to employers. It is slower, and slowness has a price that shows up in a funding round rather than in a product review.
PowerSchool, the largest listed K-12 school-information company in the United States, told the SEC in its 2023 annual report that its sales cycle "typically ranges from 3 to 18 months." That is the seller's account. The buyer's account is worse. The EdWeek Research Center asked 90 district leaders and 133 school leaders in June 2025 how long it took them to get from identifying a need to signing a contract: 78% said six months or more, and 41% said a year or more.
Then the contract lands, and the second problem starts. Institutional education software does not grow inside an account the way business software is expected to. Instructure, which runs the Canvas learning platform, disclosed net revenue retention of 109% in 2021, 106% in 2022 and 103% in 2023, with gross revenue retention falling from 95% to 93%. PowerSchool disclosed net revenue retention of 106.7% in 2023, down from 109.1%. Net revenue retention above one hundred per cent means existing customers spend a little more each year, and healthy business software is normally underwritten well clear of it. Education sits near the line and drifts down, because the number of seats is set by how many students enrol, and enrolment does not grow because your product is good.
Both companies were taken private in 2024. Bain Capital bought PowerSchool at a $5.6 billion enterprise value; KKR bought Instructure for $4.8 billion. Category leaders, contractually sticky revenue, and no public market willing to pay a growth multiple for either.
Set against that, the distribution arithmetic is unforgiving. Duolingo spent 12.1% of revenue on sales and marketing in 2025 and earned $182.4 million before tax. 2U, which built online degree programmes for universities, spent 39.3% in 2023 and lost $317.6 million in that single year. The difference between those two companies is not their product quality. It is what it costs them to find a customer.
A K-12 or ministry sale is a salesperson-led sale. It can be a very good business. It cannot be a cheap one.
The financing problem underneath all of it
Here is the part specific to this region, and it is the reason the segment question matters at all.
Across the twenty-four months to August 2026, exactly one disclosed MENA EdTech round exceeded $10 million: ULA's $28 million Series B in February 2025, led by Rua Growth Fund. Every other disclosed round in the window came in at $7.4 million or below.
A company that needs three years of patient selling into ministries needs a growth round to get there. That round does not currently exist in this market. So the choice between segments is not a preference about mission. It is a question about whether the business can be financed to profitability on the capital actually available here.
There is a second reading, and it has policy behind it as well as capital. Saudi Arabia is now 33% of the regional cohort, and its Human Capability Development Program has targeted sending 70,000 citizens to the top 200 global education and training institutions by 2030. That is public money pointed squarely at workforce, in the market that has just become the region's largest EdTech base. The global tilt and the Gulf's own policy are pointing the same way. The regional cohort is not.
We cannot settle which reading is right, and neither can anybody else, because the underlying number does not exist. Wamda's FY2025 report on MENA venture funding breaks out fintech, proptech and e-commerce, and gives no education line. MAGNiTT's H1 2026 summary breaks out fintech and logistics, and gives no education line. The last time anybody published EdTech's share of venture funding in a MENA market was MAGNiTT in November 2021, which put EdTech at more than 30% of all Jordanian venture funding and 17% of its deals, against 9% of deals in Saudi Arabia and 5% in Egypt. Five years later there is no update.
[FIKR TO CONFIRM: which side of the K-12 / workforce split Fikr underwrites, and the evidence behind that position.]
What a founder should do about it
Do not cite the MENA EdTech 50 as a funding statistic. It is a curated list of fifty companies. If an investor knows what it is and you present it as market share, you have lost the room.
Price the channel before you pick the segment. If your buyer is a school or a ministry, build the plan around a sale that takes six to eighteen months and a renewal that does not expand. If your buyer is an employer, you are now competing for the segment global capital prefers, which means better comparables and more competition at once.
Ask what the company looks like at $10 million of revenue, not a hundred million. On the capital this region deploys, that is the point at which the business has to work on its own.
If you are building for schools, say why the slow channel is the moat. Ministry relationships, curriculum alignment and Arabic content are genuinely hard to copy, and the eighteen-month sale is part of what makes them hard to copy. That is an argument. "The market is large" is not.
Forty-four per cent of the region's most-watched EdTech companies sell into schools, in a year when schools took 36% of global EdTech deals and the region closed one round above ten million dollars. Those three facts have to be held together. Any plan that holds only the first one is a plan that needs a growth round nobody here is writing.