The company that decided an industry should take an hour to learn - not a career to fake.
Above: the Primerli mark. Behind it, a simple heresy - that people finish the training they actually enjoy.
The pitch is at nine. The client runs a fund. And the analyst on the hook has read exactly one Wikipedia page, three half-loaded tabs, and a Medium post from 2019. This is the ordinary panic of professional life: being handed an industry you do not yet speak, and being expected to sound fluent by lunch. For most of corporate history the fix was a 90-slide onboarding deck that nobody finishes and a prayer.
Primerli is the company that looked at that morning and refused to accept it. Its answer is deceptively small - a one-hour, story-based video primer that walks you through a sector's trends, terminology, value chain, and economics, built by people who actually worked in it. Not a textbook. Not a webinar. Something closer to a well-produced documentary that happens to leave you employable in a room you couldn't enter yesterday.
Animated, narrated crash courses covering the essentials of a sector - key trends, terminology, the value chain, the economics, and the products and services that move the money.
A growing catalog - private equity, financial services, airlines, ocean shipping, media, film & TV, and more - licensed to teams and slotted into existing corporate training or university curricula.
Interactive, scenario-based assessments that test whether you can apply the knowledge, not just recognize it on a multiple-choice list.
Average e-learning completion runs 5 to 10 percent. Primerli's engagement-first philosophy pushes it to 78.6 percent.
- Primerli, on why enjoyment is not a luxury but the whole strategy
Before Primerli, Hakan Unsal was a principal at Boston Consulting Group, where he learned first-hand the limits of slide-based learning: even brilliant professionals struggled to get up to speed on unfamiliar sectors, and the standard materials made it worse. His own story runs against type - he struggled academically until an engaging teacher changed the trajectory, a memory that became the company's founding conviction.
He went on to a Master's at Cornell and a Ph.D. at Columbia, then built the thing he wished had existed: industry knowledge with the structure of consulting and the production values of entertainment.
Consultancies, financial-services and legal firms, executive-search shops, sales teams, and technology/SaaS companies use primers to ramp people into new verticals fast - and to make onboarding something people finish.
Primerli partners with universities to give students a working map of how real industries operate before they ever walk into an interview.
Seed round. Primerli closes seed funding led by LoftyInc Capital Management (amount undisclosed) to expand the platform and grow the content library.
On stage. Founder Hakan Unsal, Ph.D., featured as a presenter at the NACE25 Conference & Expo on preparing students for the workforce.
Refresh cadence. Primers are updated regularly so learners aren't studying an industry that has already moved on.
The first two videos of every primer are free on YouTube - a rare edtech company confident enough to let you taste the product first.
Rewind the morning and change one thing: instead of three broken tabs, the analyst watched a one-hour Primerli primer on private equity the night before. The terminology lands. The value chain makes sense. The economics aren't a mystery to nod through. By nine, the pretending is gone - replaced by the quieter confidence of someone who did the reading, because the reading was worth doing.
That's the whole company, really. Not a claim that learning is easy, but a bet that it can be finished. Primerli didn't make industries simpler. It made them watchable - and in doing so, gave a panicked 7 a.m. its first honest shortcut.