Adventus, one of a new-ish breed of cloud-based student recruitment platforms, once expected to be recruiting 50,000 students by 2023.
The platform, which specialises in B2B transactions between institutions and recruitment agents worldwide, is rumoured to have been sold to a new owner after original investments had not led to anticipated scale and business growth.
Founded in 2018, the company has raised over A$44m from three rounds of funding and is structured across business entities in Australia and Singapore – namely Adventus Education PTE LTD, GlobalEdu Network PTE LTD, and Udify Education Holdings PTE LTD.
According to a source close to The PIE, staff at Adventus have been made aware of new investment in the company through the sale of shares to a new owner. The buyer is rumoured to be Canam Group although no public information has been released.
Accounts from 2021 for Adventus subsidiary Udify Education Holdings – based in Singapore – show significant losses.
The accounts seen by The PIE show a net cashflow loss of USD$9.2m from operating activities against revenue of USD$1.9m.
An outlay of USD$679,000 in 2021 on investment activities is also recorded, likely linked to the acquisition of Good Education Media. This brought the total losses for the accounting period to USD$9,535,461 after tax.
While Udify accounts only show a partial view of the Adventus business, they also record operating losses of USD$2.8m in 2019 and USD$3.5m 2020 respectively.
Udify Education Holdings PTE LTD made a net cashflow loss of USD$9.2m from operating activities in 2021
Trading conditions over this accounting period were tough due to pandemic border closures for Australia and New Zealand.
Any platform built on the model of achieving scale through allowing sub-agents to submit applications to master-agent university partners would have found Covid a challenge.
The aggregator business model requires huge volumes of applications in order to share commission received from universities with sub-agents while extracting a small service charge for use of the platform.
In order to win volume market share in the early growth phase, Adventus – resharing a PIE News article on its own website – explained that its model offered large bonus incentives and 100% commission agreements to agents who paid a monthly subscription to use the platform.
But equivalent accounts released by another platform, Crizac for the same period of time, paint a very different picture. The Crizac business grew exponentially through aggregation activity in 2020-2021 by pivoting to support applications to the UK and Canada, countries with borders that remained open.
It would appear that Adventus may have failed to pivot and re-channel applications in the same way, despite high expenditure on winning market share.
Nonetheless, it moved into a new business stream in 2023 announcing a deeper partnership with UK university London Met to help deliver admissions servicing via admissions and compliance division Adventus Professional Services.
Edtech aggregators attracted huge amounts of private equity investment between 2018-2022 under the promise of using software to create digital marketplaces to better serve the education agent industry.
One university stakeholder noted when The PIE was running “Student Recruitment 4.0” webinars in 2021, they were “waiting to see what’s working and what isn’t, so we can see through the hype”.
At a similar time, Applyboard was also seeking to build up its scale and sub-agent network too.
In 2021, Adventus secured A$22.7m of Series A funding from early-stage technology investment fund OIF Ventures. The injection of USD$18.1m is reflected in the Udify accounts, effectively bailing out the holdings company during that period.
However, despite being a technology company, the business model still requires physical sales and admissions operations in order to process applications and service thousands of agents and university partners.
The company currently has offices in Australia, Singapore, Pakistan, Vietnam, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal, along with partnership teams in key destination markets.
Major investor Ryan Trainor stood down as CEO in 2022 and a raft of redundancies were reported in the same year as the company attempted to control the losses.
While technology has undoubtedly disrupted the agent space, this glimpse at the Adventus accounts suggest the ‘digital’ marketplace vision for student recruitment has yet to prove to be profitable.
With policy disruption effectively capping international student numbers in the key study destinations of Australia and Canada, some of Adventus’ investors may have sought an exit through the sale of shares.
It remains to be seen if the new owners will retain the current business model or absorb the brand assets into a regular master agent model.
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