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
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.
CO-INVESTOR:LocalGlobe
Visit Academy
What they do
Tomorrow’s Education is building a student-centered digital learning platform to inspire and empower changemakers.
As the need for future skills changes rapidly, universities are failing to adapt. Tomorrow’s Education gives students, a challenge-based, active learning model and a global network of world-class mentors to help aquire the future skills and mindset needed.
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 supports dynamic interaction for students.
BRM Capital, Alex Balkanski (Benchmark 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.
What they do
Aula is the Learning Experience Platform for Higher Education, a modern alternative to learning management systems.
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
What they do
Sales Impact Academy is a subscription-based live learning platform for sales and marketing.
Knowledge on how to build a successful sales or marketing organisation is locked up in the heads of the few people that 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.
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
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.
Lumina Foundation, Rethink Education
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.
Howzat Partners, Rethink Education
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 its admission process.
Stride.VC
What they do
BibliU makes learning more effective - a digital education platform that brings textbooks to life. They deliver digital textbooks to universities in the U.K., U.S., Europe and Asia.
Physical copies of core textbooks are expensive or scarce. 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
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.
Global Founders Capital
What they do
Lingumi is a methodology that helps pre-schoolers learn English even when their parents don’t speak the language themselves.
Children between the ages of 2 and 5 can learn a foreign language as easily as their first one. Lingumi’s playful curriculum, based on academic research, is designed to help children make the most of that critical period without relying on guidance from parents.
Local Globe
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 accelerates the time it takes to do a literature review.
Matt Clifford (EF), Marathon Venture Capital, Pentech
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