If you traveled back in time and showed someone from 1750 a modern smartphone, car, or hospital, they'd be bewildered. Show them a modern classroom, and they'd probably say "Ah yes, school."

At Cherry, this observation crystallises why we're so excited about education as an investment space. When systems persist unchanged for centuries despite transformative technology, it usually signals a massive opportunity hiding in plain sight.

We've long believed that edtech represents one of Europe's most overlooked trillion-dollar opportunities.

While capital has flooded into fintech, enterprise SaaS, and consumer apps, education has remained comparatively underfunded despite its enormous potential for transformation.

Today, we've personalised everything down to our toothbrushes, yet education - the process by which we become who we are - still treats students interchangeably.

The architecture of learning has yet to be reimagined for an era where information is abundant but understanding is scarce, where skills evolve faster than curricula can be updated, and where personalisation is proven to dramatically outperform.

That's precisely why we're leading Alice.Tech's $4.8M seed round.

Education's AI Paradox

The generation entering higher education today will spend their entire professional lives working alongside AI. Rather than fighting this reality, we should be asking:

• How do we prepare students to use AI tools effectively?
• How do we distinguish between AI as a shortcut vs. AI as an amplifier of human potential?

For the first generation of AI-native learners, the skills that matter most aren't memorisation or formulaic writing - they're critical thinking, information synthesis, and knowing how to direct AI tools toward meaningful ends.

The most valuable skill becomes ‘metacognition’ i.e. understanding what you know, what you don't know, and how to navigate the difference.

Alice.Tech integrates AI as a learning companion that helps students identify their knowledge gaps and build personalised paths toward mastery, teaching students both content and the meta-skill of effective learning itself.

Why Invest Now?

Decades of research has proven that personalised, active learning dramatically outperforms passive, standardised education. We've now reached a genuine inflection point for education technology due to three reasons:

1. The post-COVID generation has permanently different expectations about flexibility and personalisation in learning
2. AI has advanced beyond pattern matching to a point where it can understand nuance and generate truly useful, context-aware explanations
3. The economics of education have become so obviously broken that even conservative institutions are reconsidering fundamental assumptions

A recent Adobe study showed 90% of college students already use generative AI for classwork. Yet there's a disconnect - the same study showed 77% of students want colleges to offer AI skills courses, fewer than 40% of universities have implemented any policies on AI use.

Alice arrives at the precise moment when these forces converge, having already grown significantly since they started building in 2024.

But this growth shouldn't be mistaken for yet another viral edtech phenomenon. When discussing education investments, Duolingo inevitably enters the conversation.

Duolingo deserves credit for pioneering engagement in educational technology, creating an experience that keeps users coming back.

Its remarkable growth to a $17 billion market cap demonstrates the massive appetite for digital learning tools. Yet Duolingo learning data suggests there's still room for innovation in learning outcomes.

This is precisely why now is the moment for Alice's approach. The market has proven people want digital learning tools, but the core challenge remains unsolved - products that drive both engagement and actual learning outcomes.

Alice transforms learning by mapping conceptual structures from uploaded materials and creating personalised testing patterns that identify knowledge gaps. Its "Study with Friends" feature turns traditionally solitary studying into a social experience, making learning both more effective and naturally viral - reflecting how people actually learn best.

The European EdTech Opportunity

Edtech, despite its market size, remains largely underinvested in transformative approaches.

This is particularly true in Europe, where despite world-class educational traditions, we've struggled to build global edtech companies. The challenge has always been crossing national boundaries with their different languages, educational systems, and cultural contexts.

AI changes this equation.

Now, an European edtech company can efficiently adapt to multiple markets without rebuilding from scratch for each one. Alice demonstrates how AI can be the bridge that allows European educational values to scale globally.

Denmark provides an especially fitting foundation for this vision. Its educational philosophy emphasises critical thinking, creativity, and collaboration - precisely the higher-order skills that become more, not less, important in an AI-augmented world.