Enki

Enki started, as many good software companies do, as something smaller and more charming than what it became. It was a mobile app - launched under the developer-friendly handle @enkidevs - that taught people to code and work with data in short, daily bursts. This is a genre. What was less common was that people actually finished. Enki reports a Net Promoter Score of 91 and something like a 95% engagement rate, numbers that in edtech are close to suspicious, because the defining feature of most online learning is that people abandon it. Apple named it App of the Day. Google gave it Editor's Choice. Roughly three million professionals passed through, leaving more than 20,000 five-star reviews.

Now, a company could build a perfectly nice business selling a $5-a-month app to curious individuals. But the founders seem to have concluded that the consumer app was less a product than a very large, very expensive research study into how adults actually learn technical skills when nobody is forcing them. And the answer they kept arriving at was: they learn from a coach - someone available at the exact moment you're stuck, who knows your specific situation, and who tells you the next thing rather than the everything.

The trouble with coaching has always been that it doesn't scale. A human coach can help one person at a time, which is why coaching is a luxury and courses are a commodity. Enki's wager is that AI collapses that distinction. Its current product is an on-demand AI coach that answers your question, in your context, tuned to the tool your company actually runs. The pitch to a company is not "train your people" - training is something done to you, on a schedule, in a room you'd rather not be in. It is "give everyone a coach," which is a different verb entirely.

The economics of this are worth pausing on. If you're an enterprise, you have already sunk real money into business-intelligence licenses. Every seat that goes underused is pure waste - you're paying for a capability nobody exercises. Enki's enterprise product positions itself precisely against that waste: raise data literacy and tool adoption across the org, with content customized to the stack. It's the rare edtech pitch that maps cleanly onto a line item a CFO already regrets. Reported customers span fintech and beyond - Kiavi, Privacy.com, Jackpocket, Fairmarkit, Outschool, the UK bank Monzo, and Jane App.

None of this would be interesting if the people running it were first-timers, and they are conspicuously not. CEO Kirill Makharinsky graduated from Oxford with a double first in mathematics and, per his own telling, as the UK's top graduate of his year. Before Enki he helped build Emerging Travel and Quid, companies with meaningful revenue, and landed on Forbes' 30 Under 30 Europe. His co-founder and CTO, Bruno Marnette, is himself a repeat founder. This is a team that has raised money before and, notably, chose to raise a small seed - $920,000 in 2022, with Learn Capital, whose portfolio includes the sort of edtech names (Duolingo, Coursera) that make the thesis legible - rather than a large one.

The most telling move, though, may be the community round Enki later opened on Wefunder, inviting its own users to become shareholders. You can read this cynically as a marketing exercise, and maybe it partly is. But community rounds have a way of exposing whether people actually like the thing. You cannot manufacture an NPS of 91, and you cannot easily persuade indifferent users to write you a check. Enki's strongest asset isn't its funding or even its founders' pedigree - it's that a large number of people used the product, finished it, and told their app store about it. Whether that affection survives the trip into the enterprise is the open question, and it's the one worth watching.