Engines of Opportunity
The future of learning and work is defined by an increasing social divide between those who can use computers to increase their productivity, and those who try to compete against them. We invest in engines of opportunity: companies that bridge that divide, by democratising access to higher skills and meaningful employment.
What they do
Yoto is a clever speaker for kids that provides screen-free access to a rich library of curated audio content.
Parents are increasingly concerned about the effect of screen use on young children. Yoto gives kids control over what songs, stories, or learning content they listen to and when, with a carefully curated library of cards that adapts and grows with children over time.
CO-INVESTOR:Acton Capital, Global Founders Capital
What they do
Project-based online education platform for Latin American and Spanish creative professionals.
The absolute majority of courses online are in English. This means that most of the world’s population has no access to them. Crehana’s Spanish courses make project-based learning a reality for digital professionals in Latin America and demonstrably improve their job prospects.
General Atlantic, Howzat Partners, Rethink Education
What they do
Edurino makes digital education tangible with an adaptive learning app, real figurines and an ergonomic stylus.
Edurino is building the bridge between analogue and digital learning to teach children the 21st century skills which they will need to shape the future. Learning experiences adapt to each child's individual speed and parents are provided with full transparency.
BTOV, DN Capital,
What they do
FourthRev connects leading companies and universities to deliver up-to-date, industry-relevant programs.
FourthRev builds courses with industry partners like AWS, Salesforce, Xero and Tableau, and then partners with universities to validate and deliver these courses to students, helping address the global shortage of tech skills.
Educapital, Reach Capital
What they do
Mattilda is a B2B SaaS and a financial solution aimed at disrupting private schools' financial management and administrative processes.
Mattilda's SaaS solution automates schools' administrative and collections processes. The company's tech solution coupled with its tuition factoring and cash flow-based lending products empower schools to achieve their potential and focus on what they do best.
QED Investors, DILA Capital, GSV Ventures, Picus Capital
What they do
Sales Impact Academy is a subscription-based live learning platform for sales and marketing.
Knowledge about how to build a successful sales or marketing organisation is locked up in the heads of the few people who have achieved true scale. SIA unlocks this knowledge for its community of learners via live synchronous online classes run by world’s scale-up sales and marketing experts.
Founders Collective, Lerer Hippeau, Stage2 Capital
What they do
The remote-first Tomorrow University of Applied Sciences allows learners to build the 21st-century skills needed in the areas of sustainability, entrepreneurship, and technology.
As the need for future skills changes rapidly, universities are failing to adapt. Tomorrow combines state-of-the-art learning science and technology, to create flexible, accessible, and effective learning experiences that equip learners with the key ingredients for impact — purpose, capability, and community.
What they do
Causaly reduces the time it takes to create a hypothesis in biomedicine.
Causaly uses NLP to identify causal relationships in published research data. They remove the need to trawl through research papers guided only by keywords, and significantly accelerate the time it takes to do a literature review.
Index Ventures, Marathon Venture Capital, Pentech
What they do
Unibuddy connects prospective students with the university's student ambassadors online.
Unibuddy changes the way universities attract, inform and recruit students by placing peer-to-peer interactions at the core of their admission process.
Stride.VC
What they do
Allows universities to provide mentorship throughout the student lifecycle.
Many students struggle to forge the long-lasting relationships that drive student success and open doors. Many institutions support small pockets of high-impact mentorship, however, these programmes rarely are able to support 100 students, let alone 1,000s. Mentor Collective enables them to deliver mentorship at scale.
Resolve Growth Partners, Lumina Foundation, Rethink Education
What they do
Engageli delivers an inclusive digital learning platform for superior teaching and learning experiences that optimizes student success.
As learning moves online there is a need for an inclusive, social and data-driven engaging learning experience. Engageli gives instructors access to powerful active-learning features that support dynamic interaction for students.
BRM Capital, Alex Balkanski (Benchmark Capital)
What they do
FutureFit AI partners with organisations and governments to provide workers with an AI-powered tool to help them navigate their careers.
FutureFit AI's "GPS for your Career" uses advanced labour market data and machine learning algorithms to identify an individual's 'starting point' in the labour market, recommend best fit career path 'destinations', and build a personalised roadmap of learning, resources, and work opportunities to successfully guide them from point A to point B.
JPMorgan Chase, Acumen America
What they do
Morressier is a platform to share, discuss, and evaluate research-in-progress, bringing the world of academic conferences online.
Academic conferences are central to how researchers share and discuss early findings, but they remain resolutely analogue. Morressier makes organizing conferences easy, centralizing communications and surfacing the stand-out sessions from each event.
Cherry Ventures, Red Alpine Ventures
What they do
Colossyan enables users to create Learning and Development videos from text using Artificial Intelligence.
Colossyan sidesteps the traditional video creation process, removing the need for cameras, studios, and conventional actors. Colossyan's approach cuts down the time necessary to create videos from weeks to minutes.
LAUNCHUB Ventures
What they do
FoondaMate is a "Personal Assistant for learning" on WhatsApp and Facebook messenger, for students previously unable to use the internet to study.
FoondaMate is working on unlocking internet-enabled learning for students in emerging markets. Their low data and chat-first applications come in multiple regional languages and popular chat applications like WhatsApp and Facebook messenger. This enables a student to download study material and get answers to questions while studying.
LocalGlobe
What they do
Junto is a learning platform that unlocks the business playbooks of world-class tech executives for companies and their talents through highly-interactive cohort-based live classes.
Junto creates transformational learning experiences by giving organizations access to those leading executives, thereby significantly increasing employee performance and retention.
Earlybird
What they do
Sparkwise is a multiplayer learning platform where professionals master skills together, through interactive group challenges, available on demand.
Traditional online learning struggles to deliver impact at scale. Solve for scale, and you’re left with click-click software people dread. Solve for impact, and you need a people-heavy model that is expensive to scale. Sparkwise makes it possible to massively scale active learning in groups — with smart technology that removes the need for live instructors.
Vitalize VC
What they do
Cadmus is the world’s first authentic assessment for learning platform powering the delivery of summative, formative, and open-book exam styles for every academic discipline.
Cadmus removes learning participation barriers by providing educators and diverse student cohorts with access to high-quality, pedagogical assessment anywhere, anytime.
What they do
BibliU makes learning more effective - a digital education platform that brings textbooks to life, delivering digital textbooks to universities in the U.K., U.S., Europe, and Asia.
BibliU is the only company that has partnerships with every major UK publisher along with full-text search across every book. Students end up spending twice as much time in BibliU as they do on Snapchat.
Nesta, Oxford Sciences Innovation
What they do
Enroly automates the compliance, visa and arrival process for universities, their international students and agents.
Enroly’s technology is transforming the way universities recruit and onboard students by speeding up the administration process, automating conversion, and streamlining visa compliance. Enroly’s Data Insights platform has brought real-time reporting and aggregated international data to higher education for the first time.
Larsen Ventures, Charlotte Street Capital
What they do
Zavvy is a learning platform enabling companies to automate impactful onboarding and training experiences.
To stay competitive, companies have to ensure their employees continuously learn and develop. However, setting up and maintaining effective learning initiatives requires a lot of manual effort. Automating elaborate onboarding and training workflows, Zavvy enables HR and L&D teams to deliver engaging learning experiences at a fraction of the regular time and cost.
La Famiglia VC, Picus Capital
What they do
Academy is a world-class accelerator for diverse, early-stage tech talent, launching its Scholars through a transformative program into impactful careers at leading tech companies.
The tech industry is seeing an ever-increasing skills and diversity deficit. By structuring connections between high-potential talent, best-in-class educators, and leading tech companies, Academy is creating a sustainable infrastructure to fuel the tech industry with high-performance, diverse thinkers.
LocalGlobe
What they do
LIS is building a new university that will give students the skills to go and tackle some of society's most complex problems.
Students will put their learnings to work through paid work placements at some of the UK’s top organisations including, Virgin, McKinsey and the Met Police. The LIS curriculum will cut across disciplinary boundaries, equipping students with knowledge and methods from across the arts, sciences and humanities.
JamJar, Andrew Mullinger (Funding Circle)
What they do
StudyStream is a video platform and online community that allows students to study with others from around the world 24/7 and in real-time.
StudyStream has helped more than 3 million students be more productive & motivated, while also feeling less isolated. Their mission is to create a global community of students who can motivate each other to succeed.
Localglobe, Brighteye Ventures, Y Combinator
What they do
Guider is the go-to education app for Muslims that provides authentic, structured and practical guidance to help Muslims get closer to God in less than five minutes each day.
With Christian platforms such as Glorify and Hallow reaching millions of users and each raising >$40m in the last two years alone, there is a significant untapped market opportunity for the audience of >2 billion Muslims worldwide.
Ada Ventures, Collective Continuum, Angels
What they do
Lynx Educate is a pioneer in connecting leading education institutions with European companies to upskill employees through accredited and certified programs.
Today’s labor market demands better-educated employees. Companies are struggling to attract, develop and retain workers with the right skills. We work with companies to identify their needs and connect them to leading educational institutions.
Rethink Education, Brighteye Ventures, Bisk Ventures, Reach Capital, Guild Education
What they do
Eduflow is a tool to build incredible learning experiences, full of active participation and student collaboration.
Learning is most effective when it involves active participation, a fact not always respected in an online environment. Keeping students accountable and involving them in the learning process means they will be more motivated, and less likely to drop out. Eduflow lets learners submit work, peer review and reflect on feedback.
Y-Combinator, Nordic Makers, Project A, Learn Capital
What they do
Aula is the learning experience platform for Higher Education, a modern alternative to learning management systems. (acquired by Coventry University).
Ubiquitous and clunky learning management systems focus on record-keeping at the expense of the learning experience. Aula’s conversational platform and ecosystem of integrations makes communication the lynchpin of university study, improving student engagement and satisfaction.
Reach Capital, Brighteye Ventures, Project A
