Neon Adventures

Neon Adventures is a private equity firm, established in 2014 and based in London.

Described by founder Neil Hutchinson as his 'personal investment vehicle', it has invested in a nunber of technology companies, properties and funds and has a philanthropic arm, Neon Foundation. The Foundation launched a joint initiative with schools operator, Ark in 2015 called Assembly, which is 'a new cloud-based service to break open the market for start-up education technology companies'.

Investments in education technology

Neon Adventures has invested in a number of education technology firms, including:

• Code Kingdoms, an educational tool for teaching coding (JavaScript) to children, which has worked with other learn to code outreach organisations, such as Code Club and Teach First, to get its product into kids’ hands. TechCrunch noted in 2015: 'while [Code Kingdom]'s giving its software to schools for free, it’s aiming to monetize via the play-at-home game version of the product — using schools as its low-cost distribution mechanism to get in front of lots of kids’ eyeballs. In future it plans to sell premium content for the non-schools version of its software to kids’ parents. “We see schools as a channel to acquire users,” Code Kingdom co-founder, Ross Targett notes. “The kids will discover the product in their class and then they’ll go home and play… We thought this was a really good way to acquire users very cheaply that are very engaged. And use schools as a promotional channel."
• Zzish: a learning software company that has created a 'dashboard' that presents student data collected across multiple apps ('track learning easily'); www.zzish.co
• Bibblio, an aggregator of free learning materials on the web: http://bibblio.org
• Primo: makers of Cubetto, a 'block-based' coding language designed for children in pre-literate years: www.primotoys.com/cubetto

It has also invested in:

• Emerge Education, a London based accelerator programme for ed tech startups: http://emerge.education

People

• Neil Hutchinson: founder. Hutchinson also founded, and and remain the principal investor in, the Forward Internet Group, set up in 2004, which also buys and invests in web-based firms. It also had a philanthropic arm, Forward Foundation.

Contacts

• Website: neonadventures.com