Claret Capital Partners’ Post

Transcript

Zen Educate is a platform for temporary staff to work in education, primarily K-12 schools. Our mission is to make the world of teaching better, fairer for both students and teachers. Now in 2024, we're one of the largest providers in the UK for supply teachers. Previously, two years ago in 2022, we actually launched in the US and are having a hyperscaling journey in the US where we're doing incredibly well. Also, we've done two acquisitions here in the UK - one in 2023 and another in 2022, where we've been able to acquire some of our regional competitors and re-platform around to the Zen system and Claret have been amazing at helping us fund and execute on those transactions. What we really liked about Zen Educate was there were disrupting an industry that was predominantly dominated by legacy staffing agencies that were operating on a low tech platform. Zen Educate's platform was very tech enabled and very user friendly from both a teacher and a school's perspective, and they ensured that the right teacher was in the right school at the right time. We chose Claret because we wanted a debt provider that really understood us as a business and really tried to help support our plans. When we spoke to a lot of other debt providers, we realized that there wasn't as much flexibility as Claret can offer. Since Claret's investment, the company has scaled very impressively in the UK and also in the US, where it's seeing really, really strong growth at the moment. The company's also successfully closed a Series B round in Q2 2024, so we're super excited at Claret to be part of the journey here, and the team have been absolutely amazing to deal with since day one. My advice for those considering venture debt is make sure you're ready for it. Typically it's a great tool to accelerate growth, but once you've reached a level of predictability in your business. I'd say it's definitely much more detail oriented than equity, so really get into the weeds of your terms and conditions because they're much more important than your typical equity round. Looking into the future, I see an opportunity for Zen Educate to build a substantial business across the US and the UK, that also does genuine good in the world, helping both schools and teachers.