Why we spun EdTech out of devtodev

Edvice didn't start as a standalone company. It was an educational business unit inside devtodev, the game-analytics firm, which I joined as Business Development Director in late 2020. A year later, we separated it into its own legal entity — and I stayed with the new entity as CPO.

Why spin it out

Three reasons, in roughly this order.

1. Different customers

devtodev's customer is a product team at a game studio. Edvice's customer was a different persona — someone responsible for skill development, hiring pipelines, or professional upskilling. Selling into those two buyers is two different motions, with different cycle lengths and different metrics. Forcing them into one sales function would have compromised both.

2. Different cadence

The analytics product iterates continuously against a live-games market. The educational product iterates against programme cohorts. The rhythms don't line up. A separate entity could run on its own quarterly clock without having to negotiate calendar space with the parent roadmap.

3. Capital structure

Spinning out let Edvice raise its own round on its own terms. Capital earmarked for EdTech finds EdTech cleaner than it finds an analytics company with an EdTech side business.

How it happened

Mechanically it went through three steps:

Establish the separate legal entity.
Negotiate what IP, contracts, and relationships moved with it versus what stayed at devtodev.
Close an external round for the new entity and start running it as its own company.

I handled the strategy and the negotiation on the Edvice side; the CEO at devtodev handled the parent side. The hand-off worked because neither of us tried to quietly carry forward an assumption that the old relationship would keep holding.

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