If you've managed to get your hands on our cohort-based courses (CBC) teaser, you can skip all this text and jump right into the presentation. If you haven't seen the teaser around, these are just a few highlights

At Lightbox, we track education very closely. Given our focus on companies creating positive externalities of consumption, we believe education genuinely transforms livelihoods, especially when it is packaged the right way. We're excited about how edtech is transforming from Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) designed for passive online content consumption to high-intent CBCs with tangible and oftentimes monetary outcomes. As we have said in our teaser, CBCs are time-bound, highly interactive community based courses addressing skill-based topics across various verticals with clear-cut incentives, leading to near-perfect completion rates. These courses can range from software engineering upskilling to learning how to bake a lemon meringue pie for your significant other.

In our universe, CBC companies can be bucketed into three categories: upskilling for employability, creator focused CBCs and vocational, passion skill CBCs. These can further be plotted across a spectrum of high to low technical skill delivery. We believe the greatest opportunity lies in the high technical skills category, given it has the most motivated customers who get placed through the platform with AOVs that far exceed CAC. This category also has the largest gap between the demand of enterprises and the skillset of human capital, which makes upskilling for employability the call of the hour. 

In general, CBCs are at a nascent stage with various companies building across innumerable verticals. We believe CBCs are positioned to succeed provided companies are able to leverage community, ensure quality instructors with scale and maintain cohorts of highly motivated customers.

Check out the deck below to understand how we look at the space and its future. Also, if you’re building a CBC company or want to talk about edtech, please reach out to us