A social enterprise with a slightly heretical idea: finance job training at no cost to the individual or the government, and skip philanthropy entirely. The bill gets settled later - out of the extra taxes a newly employed worker pays.
Here is a problem that everyone agrees on and no one wants to pay for: the gap between the skills people have and the jobs that exist. Forte's answer is not a better course. It is a better invoice.
The standard way to fund reskilling is to have someone - a government, a foundation, a hopeful individual with a credit card - pay upfront and pray it works. Forte finds this arrangement mildly absurd. If the training works, a newly employed worker will, over the following years, pay a lot more in income tax than the training cost. So the money to pay for the training already exists. It is just sitting in the future, in a tax receipt that hasn't been printed yet.
Forte's business is dragging that money back to the present. It positions itself between the people who fund training and the people who deliver it, and it rewires the incentives so that funders, in the company's phrasing, "never fund failure." You pay when someone gets trained, hired, and stays hired. If the program flops, the bill doesn't come.
This is a genuinely different posture. Most workforce programs are measured by how many people show up. Forte measures placement, job quality, and retention, and it ties dollars to those numbers. When failure is free, funders stop caring about brochures and start caring about outcomes - which, conveniently, is what everyone claimed to care about all along.
The name is an acronym only an economist would love: FORTE, Financing Of Return To Employment. The economist in question is Dr Nat Ware, who worked the idea out during a PhD on education finance at Oxford and has been implementing it ever since. His pitch is disarmingly literal - training costs less than the tax uplift it creates - which is the kind of sentence a finance minister can actually act on.
The mechanism, stripped down, is outcomes-based financing. Investors put up the money and take the early-stage risk. A government agrees to share a slice of the additional income-tax revenue that trained, employed workers generate. If people get good jobs, investors earn a return and the state comes out ahead on net new tax. If they don't, the investors eat the loss and the public purse is untouched. The individual pays nothing, ever.
It is the sort of structure that sounds too tidy until you notice that the whole thing hinges on measurement. Forte has to know, credibly, whether a person got a durable job and how much better off they are. Which is why the less glamorous half of the company is a vetting operation - a network of training providers carrying independently verified performance benchmarks, so that "it worked" is a number rather than a vibe.
"I honestly don't know any investment that has better alignment of social impact and financial return."
- Nat Ware, Founder & CEO, ForteMoney starts with investors, flows into training, and comes back out of the tax system. The elegant part is that no step requires the learner to pay.
Investors and funders put up capital to pay for training, taking the early-stage risk.
Vetted providers with verified benchmarks reskill people for real, in-demand jobs.
Success is measured by job placement, job quality and retention - not attendance.
The income-tax uplift from newly employed workers repays investors. Learners pay nothing.
Reskill a workforce without new upfront spending, and only pay when it demonstrably works.
Invest in underserved communities with dollars tied to measurable employment outcomes.
Upskill and retrain staff through a model built around results rather than seat time.
Access fully funded, high-quality training for future jobs - at no personal cost.
Join a global network and get paid for performance against verified benchmarks.
Back reskilling with a return profile aligned to social outcomes and tax uplift.
Ware grew up in Australia, one of five kids of schoolteacher parents. He didn't leave the country until he was 16 - a trip to Mozambique with World Vision. He went on to a doctorate in economics and an MBA at Oxford, where his thesis on education finance became the blueprint for Forte.
Before Forte, he founded 180 Degrees Consulting, described as the world's largest consultancy for nonprofits. His TEDx talk, "Why we're unhappy - the expectation gap," has drawn more than two million views - a reminder that he can explain a complicated idea to a skeptical room, which turns out to be the core skill of selling outcomes-based finance to finance ministers.
His stated ambition is unsubtle: to make this one of the main ways the world finances education and, eventually, healthcare.
The company scaled not by spending more, but by aligning incentives well enough that governments, investors and workers could all say yes at once.
Forte's early capital came largely from Australian venture investors who liked the idea that impact and return could point the same direction.
| Round | Amount | Date | Lead / Notable Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | ~$3.3M | Nov 2022 | Blackbird Ventures, Regal Funds Management, Reinventure, 5V Capital |
| Seed (earlier) | part of ~$13.9M total | 2021 | Blackbird Ventures & syndicate |
Forte Global expands to Peru and launches an AI training program.
Nat Ware and Forte featured in UBS Global Visionaries on unlocking human potential.
US mainland launch announced, with Rhode Island as the first state - a fifth country/territory in two years.
Seed round closed to scale outcomes-based reskilling programs.
Forte founded to turn a PhD thesis on education finance into a working company.
Sources include forteglobal.com, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, Blackbird Ventures, OnImpact, UBS Global Visionaries, MIT Solve, the World Economic Forum, and Nat Ware's TEDx talk. Financial figures are approximate and drawn from public records. Contact on file: nware@forteglobal.com.