The educational technology (EdTech) industry as we know it today is relatively young and developed in the early 2010s when the number of newly established Edtech companies started sharply increasing (Komljenovic et al., 2021) and Venture capital (VC) investment in Edtech rising from $500 million in 2010 to more than $20 billion in 2021 (HolonIQ, 2022). The industry is now consolidating, as indicated by the rising value of individual investments into particular companies (Brighteye Ventures, 2022), a rising number of acquisitions (Brighteye Ventures, 2022), and the emergence of ‘Big Edtech’ (Williamson, 2022). EdTech is increasingly prominent in HE by structuring teaching and learning processes, determining how education is governed, and reframing educational purposes (Decuypere et al., 2021). In such context, it matters what kind of EdTech is innovated and rolled out into the sector, and what kind of value it brings to its key actors. This paper focuses on three key stakeholders in EdTech, namely universities, EdTech companies, and investors in EdTech. It presents some of the results from a larger ESRC-funded project ‘Universities and unicorns’ (Komljenovic et al., 2021), that collected and analysed more than 2,000 documents and more than 50 interviews with university, company and investor leaders. It argues that there are discrepancies and tensions in how these three actors perceive and construct value of EdTech in HE. For investors, EdTech is an investment category that should bring a return on investment. For companies, EdTech brings specific niche benefits, mostly focusing on institutional efficiencies, and automation and personalisation of learning. Universities value EdTech as a means for boosting recruitment, reputation, and student experience, as well as a potential source of organisational and pedagogical innovation. Some of the key tensions between these orientations are temporality (investors, especially venture capital, want rapid scale and fast returns; while universities work on longer cycles), stability (start-ups might aim to be sold to another company or change price and service in the near future, but universities need stability and longevity), nature of innovation (who participates in innovating and what are the pedagogical and ethical premises), and expectations (investor and company discourse promotes ideas of data-rich operations such as AI, but universities experience only unsophisticated EdTech products with basic feedback loops at best). For EdTech to be useful for students, staff and other HE actors, and sustainable, these discrepancies should be addressed.

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