This paper is situated in the field of critical edtech studies that aim to gain nuanced empirical understanding of recent developments in the edtech scene (Decuypere & Hartong, 2022; Macgilchrist, 2021). One example hereof is the edtech start-up sector; a sector that has thus far hardly received any scholarly attention (Williamson & Komljenovic, 2022; Tripathi et al., 2019). Seeking to obtain a more profound understanding of this sector, this paper presents a team ethnography conducted with an international team of 8 researchers at the end of 2022, in a trade fair that was exclusively focused on edtech start-ups. Our main research interest is what makes the edtech start-up sector a specific sector distinguishable from the general edtech sector, as well as how it seeks to create and extract value out of the educational sector. As such, our contribution seeks to contribute to emerging scholarship on the importance of analysing trade fairs in education (e.g., Player-Koro et al., 2022; Gulson & Witzenberger, 2022). Analytically, our analysis is focused on the discursive construction of value through stories, rhetorical constructs (e.g., ‘unicorns’; ‘ecosystems), and sociomaterial artefacts present in the trade fair (ibid.; Birch, 2022). The preliminary results of our analysis indicate different areas of value creation. First, even though the edtech start-up sector strives for global reach, we can at the same time discern a very localised ‘geography of tech production’, in which the hosting city of the fair seeks to extract value for the city itself as ‘innovation complex’ (cf. Zukin, 2020). Second, we see that venture capital is made central in the education sector, by means of projecting future value into the present (cf. Birch, 2022). Third, we discern the rising importance of ‘meta-organisations’ that create value for the edtech start-up sector by adopting intermediary positions between start-up corporations and schools. Fourth, and last, we can approach the fair itself as creating expert knowledge for start-ups: amongst all types of valuations, expert knowledge on the specificity of the educational sector – as a sector very distinct from traditional sectors to invest in – is the one that matters most. In conclusion, the paper argues that education is a very specific field, characterised by unique features (e.g., harder to ‘access’ and ‘scale’) that need to be taken into account if we want to fully edtech start-ups as new actors in the edtech scene.

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