Everway names Rick Medlock Chairman amid edtech consolidation push

Rothschild-backed Everway brings a Worldpay and Inmarsat-era CFO to the chair as it consolidates four acquisitions into a unified edtech platform.

By Disrupts Editorial Team Mon, 28 September 2026 AI level 2 of 5

AI level 2 of 5: drafted by our AI editorial assistant from the company's announcement; fact-checked, edited and signed off by Mark Walker, Editorial Director. What the levels mean

Brightly lit modern conference room with a long wooden table and grey chairs, offering a view of a city skyline through large windows.

Everway, the global education and workplace technology company backed by Five Arrows, the alternative assets arm of Rothschild & Co, has appointed Rick Medlock as Chairman of its board. Medlock, a seasoned non-executive director with more than 30 years of leadership across international technology businesses, takes the seat as Everway absorbs four recent acquisitions and positions itself as the dominant platform provider for learners and employees with diverse learning needs.

Founder Martin McKay moves into a Vice Chairman role, preserving his institutional knowledge of the market while Medlock and incoming Chief Executive Jill Popelka, appointed in July, lead the next phase of growth. The dual transition signals a deliberate professionalisation of Everway's governance structure, the kind of board-level reengineering that private equity owners typically orchestrate ahead of a liquidity event.

A career built around transformative capital moments

Medlock's CV reads as a map of significant technology inflection points. He served as CFO of Inmarsat, the satellite communications company, across a critical decade of mobile-data expansion from 2004 to 2013. He then held the same role at Misys, a financial software group, before joining Worldpay, where he oversaw the payment processor's London Stock Exchange listing in 2015 before its merger with Vantiv. He has since sat on the boards of Deliveroo, Smith+Nephew, Sophos and Datatec, and currently chairs Agilio Software, a healthcare services software business.

That breadth is directly relevant to Everway's ambitions. The company, formed through the merger of Texthelp and n2y, has subsequently folded in TeachTown, SpedTrack, Matchware and Embrace Education to build out a unified platform spanning literacy support, special education, workplace productivity and accessibility across K-12, higher education and enterprise markets. Integrating four acquisitions under a single commercial architecture is precisely the kind of operational challenge that rewards a chair who has managed complex post-merger balance sheets at scale.

Convergence of edtech, accessibility and private equity cycles

The Everway appointment sits within a broader and accelerating convergence of edtech, accessibility software and private equity capital allocation. Five Arrows, which first invested in the business in 2020, manages €34 billion in assets under management and concentrates its corporate private equity activity explicitly on healthcare, data and software, and technology-enabled business services, a mandate that maps almost perfectly onto Everway's product surface.

For cross-sector investors, the story is less about a single chairman appointment and more about where institutional capital is moving. The accessibility technology segment, long under-invested relative to mainstream edtech, is being reframed by private equity as a defensible, high-retention software business with structural tailwinds: regulatory pressure on employers and educational institutions to accommodate neurodiversity, combined with AI-assisted personalisation tools that are reducing the cost of deploying adaptive learning at scale. That combination is drawing capital from PE houses that previously concentrated on fintech or healthcare IT.

Medlock's prior experience chairing Agilio, a healthcare software business, and his advisory role at SilverTree Equity further underline a thesis taking shape across Five Arrows' portfolio: that the governance playbook for scaling regulated-sector software businesses is transferable across healthcare, education and workplace technology. Boards that can execute IPO-readiness processes, Medlock has led three public listings across the US and UK, are at a premium as PE-backed edtech platforms begin to test exit windows in both London and New York.

The immediate strategic question for Everway is integration velocity. Four acquisitions in a short period create product-portfolio complexity that can erode the unit economics that private equity underwriters depend on for exit valuation. Medlock's arrival, alongside a new CEO, suggests Five Arrows is moving Everway deliberately toward a rationalised platform story credible enough for public markets scrutiny. Whether that path runs through an IPO, a strategic trade sale to a larger enterprise software group, or a further roll-up remains open, but the governance signals point toward a near-term crystallisation event.