Dreamit alum MPOWER Financing, a fintech company providing educational loans to high-potential international and DACA students, has completed its largest funding round to-date with $110 million in new financing for students enrolling in major US universities.

Selling to schools is one of the hardest parts of building an edtech company. It is critical to have a well thought-out, go-to-market strategy in place to demonstrate the value of your edtech product. This means analyzing the classic 4 P’s of Marketing: place, price, product, and promotion. In some industries, these marketing functions can be separated from sales functions. In edtech, that is impossible.

One of the most important roles for a founder is keeping employees engaged. Study after study shows that engaged workforces outperform their competition. But every company is different and there is no one-size-fits-all approach to optimize for engagement. As a founder, you’ll have to craft a bespoke approach, but here are some methods that have proved to work for our portfolio companies AND for other startups. 

Our news roundup for the week of December 12-16. Read for the latest and most in depth stories in education technology compiled by the Dreamit team.

Engagement is a huge problem in the American workforce. In 2015, Gallup found that 50.8% of employees were not engaged and almost 18% were actively disengaged. Big firms experience this problem more acutely than startups, but founders often see the disparity between their level of excitement and their employees as well. Learn how to keep employees engaged by building a community within your startup. 

Part-time piecemeal work is replacing internships in some cases. Udacity just launched a program to help graduates from its programs find short term work from potential employers. Read More

This op ed in EdSurge encourages teachers to collect student impact data on edtech products to stop the problem of gimmicks in education products. Read More