continuing-education
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Sara Leoni
Sara Leoni is the founder and CEO of Ziplines Education, a Bay Area career accelerator that partners with 30-plus universities to deliver industry-recognized certificate programs in fields like AI, project management, and digital marketing. A former Division I softball player at UNLV and ex-CEO of the $50M course-materials company Rafter, she raised a $6.4M Series A in 2023-2024 to help close the digital skills gap and has helped more than 20,000 adult learners retool their careers. She frames learning as a zipline: intimidating, exhilarating, and continuous, with a clear start and a clear landing.
Ziplines Education
Ziplines Education is a San Carlos, California-based career accelerator that partners with universities to deliver flexible, cohort-based online non-credit certificate courses in high-growth fields like AI, project management, digital marketing, business analytics, and Salesforce administration. Founded in 2017 as GreenFig and relaunched as Ziplines Education in 2024 under CEO Sara Leoni, the company blends live instruction, on-demand content, and real-world work simulations to help adult learners close the gap between traditional education and the skills the digital workforce actually demands.
Encore Vet Group
Encore Vet Group is a Saratoga Springs, New York-based community of veterinary hospitals founded in 2018 by Ted Sprinkle, DVM, Lance Sprinkle, and Bo Iler. Rather than running a top-down corporate chain, Encore acquires established community and legacy veterinary practices and then hands the day-to-day medicine and culture back to the local teams while layering on business support, leadership training, and mental-health resources. Backed by private-equity firm North Castle Partners, the group has grown to roughly 60 hospitals and around 1,900-2,200 team members, and it operates education platforms like Encore Performance Academy and the MentorCore virtual mentorship program for new graduates.
Memorang
Memorang is a Los Angeles-based education-technology company building what it calls the AI stack for education - an all-in-one, agentic platform that lets testing providers, publishers and training organizations create standards-aligned content, assessments and branded learning apps at scale. It began as a consumer flashcards-and-quizzes app for medical and professional exams and has since pivoted into a B2B platform that pairs knowledge graphs with AI agents and human-in-the-loop workflows. After winning first place among roughly 1,500 startups in the Vercel AI Accelerator, the bootstrapped company says it has delivered hundreds of millions of assessments and serves tens of millions of annual test-takers.
Colibri Group
Colibri Group is a St. Louis-based professional education company that helps licensed professionals start, sustain, and grow their careers. Through more than 40 brands - including McKissock Learning, Colibri Real Estate, Becker, and Securities Training Corporation - it delivers licensing prep, continuing education, and career-readiness courses across real estate, healthcare, financial services, accounting, teaching, and valuation. The company serves millions of learners each year and is now investing heavily in AI-powered, adaptive learning under CEO Shravan Goli.