By Marina Shulga
Education technology has spent the last decade being misfiled. We talk about it as a category of business, a sector with its own conferences and quarterly reports, when the companies that extract the most value from it sell payments, telecoms, and consumer hardware. Treating EdTech as an industry rather than a function is costing non-EdTech companies real growth in the markets they most want to enter.
I’ve spent several years building education infrastructure inside companies that have nothing to do with education. Once you stop treating learning as a product to sell and start treating it as a layer of your operations, the economics shift, sometimes dramatically.
Five functions worth the budget line
- Onboarding is where the numbers move first. A platform processing thousands of new accounts a month watches its retention curves bend when customers arrive already understanding how the product works. Support tickets drop, time-to-value shortens, and the funnel converts at higher rates because the friction has been moved upstream into a course rather than onto a frustrated user on day three.
- Retention runs on the same logic. Short courses, certifications, and structured updates give customers a reason to come back between renewals without anyone having to sell them anything.
- Sales through education is where most B2B companies fail, and they fail in a specific way. Education and sales sit in separate departments with separate budgets and separate metrics, and the leverage that comes from collapsing them never gets touched. I built this differently at a British school where the prevailing assumption was that education couldn’t be sold at all. That assumption is wrong. We treated the parent consultation as the product, with enrollment as its consequence, and grew the commercial book substantially over two years.
- Brand awareness in new markets is where education begins to behave like infrastructure. An academy or program can enter a region eighteen months before a sales team, with credibility that a vendor cannot manufacture. Governments, schools, and industry bodies open doors to an educational partner, whereas a salesperson is shut out.
- CSR done well sits on the same axis. It builds government relationships, opens access to public funding, and creates conditions for commercial expansion that would otherwise take years of lobbying. Done badly, it’s a press release with your logo on a school wall.
What an academy did for a payments company
I’ll give a concrete example. At Xsolla, a payments infrastructure provider for the gaming industry, several of the markets we wanted were closed to direct commercial entry — blocked by regulation, by cultural resistance to gaming, or by both. So we built a global academy network across more than 30 countries, including a physical campus supported by the Malaysian royal family and cooperation agreements with Saudi Arabia, Korea, and Vietnam.
Three or four teams had failed to launch the project before I took it on. It was originally scoped as a single school in Malaysia. I argued for making it a global network because a single school doesn’t do anything strategic, whereas a network can do several things at once.
The structure was a cascading funnel: academy, then incubator, then accelerator. Children and young adults came in as students. Some became players of games built by studios we supported. Others became developers themselves, building IP that needed a payment infrastructure to monetize. Regional governments funded large parts of this work because they wanted gaming hubs, and hubs require skilled people. By the time we had commercial conversations, Xsolla was already the payment layer underneath the ecosystem.
Whoever owns the IP owns the money flows. The Witcher franchise is worth billions because every downstream license and revenue share traces back to that ownership, and regions compete for IP-creation infrastructure for the same reason companies compete for distribution. Education is how you build that infrastructure from the ground up, and it puts your commercial product at the center of the economy it produces.
Why this works where sales teams don’t
In emerging markets, conservative sectors, and regulated industries, trust is the barrier, and relationships are the only currency that moves anything through it. Saudi Arabia transformed its position on gaming over a few years and now hosts an international championship. In Malaysia and Indonesia, I spent a lot of time in rooms with the parents of eight-year-olds, explaining why a child building worlds in a game was learning something closer to entrepreneurship than to idleness. A sales team cannot have that conversation. An education program can, because it arrives offering something to the family before asking for anything from them.
The people you educate over a decade become qualified leads, durable customers, and the most credible advocates you’ll have in their home markets. You replace acquisition cost with relationship equity, and the equity appreciates.
The question for boards
Companies expanding into difficult markets should stop outsourcing education to consultants and treat it as infrastructure they own. Before signing off on the next regional launch, ask your growth team one question: what’s our educational layer, and what does it cost us not to have one? The companies that answer this seriously over the next five years will hold positions in markets the rest can’t enter, through people they trained rather than people they bought.
Marina Shulga — Chief Product Officer specialising in AI-driven education and gaming-tech ecosystems across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Central Asia.
