corporate-training
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Cakap Is Turning Indonesia's Language Gap Into a Skills Business
The Jakarta company started with live language lessons. Now it sells a broader promise: skills that travel from the classroom to the workplace.
The Learning Software That Keeps Getting Out of the Way
Litmos started with one contact center and a stubborn idea: training software should be easy to launch and easier to use. Three owners and millions of learners later, simplicity is still the product strategy.
MasterClass Is Turning Celebrity Lessons Into a Career Stack
The company that taught millions to cook with Gordon Ramsay and write with Shonda Rhimes is widening its frame - from beautifully filmed inspiration to workplace training, AI rehearsal and credentials built for a changing job market.
The Caracas Startup That Turned English Into a Subscription
It started with $700, a sofa in San Francisco, and a bet that people learning English still want a human on the other end of the line. Two million students later, Open English is the accent Latin America practices in.
VMEdu Inc.
VMEdu Inc. is a global professional training and certification company founded in 2008 by Dr. Tridibesh Satpathy. It operates a portfolio of accreditation and education brands - including SCRUMstudy, 6sigmastudy, SMstudy, Kanbanstudy, OKRstudy and BALearning - and a cloud-based learning management platform used to deliver Agile, Scrum, Six Sigma, business analysis and sales-and-marketing certifications. Backed by Sequoia Capital and recognized among Red Herring's Top 100 Global companies, VMEdu has trained hundreds of thousands of professionals across 150+ countries through a network of authorized training partners.
DataCamp
DataCamp is an online learning platform that teaches data and AI skills through short, browser-based interactive exercises. Founded in 2013 and headquartered in New York, it offers 700+ courses in Python, R, SQL, Power BI, Tableau, and generative AI, along with hands-on projects, skill assessments, and industry certifications. The company serves both individual learners and enterprises, having grown to more than 10 million learners and thousands of business customers who use it to close data and AI skills gaps.
Gutenberg Technology
Gutenberg Technology is a Franco-American B2B SaaS company that builds an end-to-end Learning Content Management System (LCMS) and AI-powered authoring tools. Its MobileFirst platform lets publishers, universities, and enterprises author, transform, reuse, and distribute print and digital learning content from a single workflow. Trusted by names like Cengage, National Geographic Learning, Vista Higher Learning, and CompTIA, the platform has powered 230,000+ learning assets reaching 7+ million learners, and in 2025 launched an AI Course Builder that converts existing documents into structured eLearning modules.
OpenSesame
OpenSesame is a Portland, Oregon-based e-learning company that runs an online marketplace of curated corporate training courses. Founded in 2011, it aggregates content from hundreds of publishers into a single catalog of tens of thousands of courses spanning business skills, compliance, safety, leadership, technology and wellness, and integrates that content directly into a customer's existing learning management system. The company sells to enterprise and mid-market employers who want to buy, curate and deliver workforce training without stitching together dozens of separate vendors.
Don Spear
Don Spear is the co-founder and CEO of OpenSesame, the Portland-based marketplace that lets companies find, buy, and manage elearning courses the way people buy songs on iTunes. A Rice University engineer and Harvard MBA, he spent decades scaling companies - from PetSmart through its IPO to Banfield Pet Hospital's expansion from 4 to 250 locations - before founding BlueVolt and then OpenSesame in 2010. Today he leads a catalog of tens of thousands of courses and an AI-driven push to make workplace learning easier to find and use.
DeepBrain AI
DeepBrain AI is a generative-AI company that builds hyper-realistic digital humans. Its flagship platform, AI Studios, turns plain text scripts into professional avatar-led videos in minutes, while its AI Human technology powers real-time conversational avatars used in kiosks, virtual receptionists, banking, and AI news anchors. Founded in Seoul in 2016 and now operating from Palo Alto and beyond, the company serves enterprises across media, finance, education, and the public sector with tools that remove cameras, studios, and actors from video production.
Classera
Classera is an edtech company that runs a cloud-based Learning Super Platform used across K-12 schools, universities, and corporate and government training programs. Founded in 2011 and headquartered in San Francisco with deep roots in the MENA region, it pairs a core learning management system with gamification, AI-driven personalization, virtual-reality content, an educational marketplace (Edumalls), and embedded payments (C-Pay). The platform serves more than 12 million users in over 40 countries and, in October 2022, raised a $40M Series A led by Sanabil Investments - reportedly the largest edtech funding round in MENA and most of Africa.
ELSA, Corp
ELSA (English Language Speech Assistant) is an AI-powered English pronunciation and speaking coach built on proprietary speech-recognition technology trained on non-native accents. Founded in 2015 by Vu Van and speech scientist Xavier Anguera, the app gives learners real-time, phoneme-level feedback on how they actually sound - not just what they type. It has grown to tens of millions of users across 100+ countries and expanded from a consumer app into ELSA Business, ELSA Schools, an API, and a generative-AI conversation tool called ELSA AI Tutor.
Pandatron
Pandatron is an AI change-activation platform that helps large enterprises turn strategy into execution. Its conversational AI runs private, role-tailored coaching conversations with thousands of employees at once, then feeds leaders real-time behavioral intelligence on readiness, resistance and risk. Founded in Helsinki and now with a San Francisco presence, Pandatron works with Fortune 500 companies including SAP, Panasonic, Mitsubishi, Merck and Skanska to make coaching-driven change dramatically cheaper and more measurable.
BankersLab
BankersLab is a fintech education and decisioning company that builds 'flight simulator' style software for lenders and bankers. Founded in 2012 by Michelle Katics and Kurt Gingher, it lets banks, credit unions and lenders practice consumer, retail and SME portfolio management in a risk-free simulation environment, then extends that same engine into AI-enhanced decision support. Its gamified, team-based workshops - ScoringLab, CreditLab, CollectionLab and InsightLab - have trained thousands of banking professionals across 30+ countries.
Primerli
Primerli is an edtech company that condenses decades of industry knowledge into engaging, story-based, one-hour video 'primers' that bring any professional up to speed on an unfamiliar sector fast. Built on an 'engagement-first' content philosophy and co-created with subject-matter experts from Fortune 500 companies, its Industry Library is sold to companies, consulting and financial-services firms, and universities on a subscription basis - and reports course-completion rates of 78.6%, far above the 5-10% typical of e-learning.
Viver com Afeto
Viver com Afeto is a Belo Horizonte-based human-development company founded by facilitator Laila Tonelli. It teaches Nonviolent Communication (CNV) and Positive Discipline to families, schools and companies through lectures, corporate trainings, mentorships and experiential workshops - with the stated purpose of promoting happiness and a culture of peace by transforming how people relate and communicate.
Hakan Unsal
Hakan Unsal is the founder and CEO of Primerli, a Los Angeles area edtech company that compresses how an entire industry works into one-hour, entertainment-quality crash courses. A former BCG principal with a Cornell master's and a Columbia PhD, he started Primerli after years of cramming on unfamiliar sectors before client projects convinced him that slide decks are a terrible way to learn. His pitch: professional training should feel less like a lecture and more like a documentary you actually want to finish.
Hone
Hone is a San Diego-area software company that delivers leadership and human-skills training to enterprises through small-group, live virtual classes led by expert facilitators, paired with program-management technology and, since 2025, a voice-first AI coach called Hone AI. Founded in 2018 by FanDuel co-founder Tom Griffiths and former CultureIQ leaders, Hone helps companies deploy, manage, and measure manager, leadership, and DEIB training at scale for distributed and hybrid teams. It has trained more than 50,000 people for customers including IBM, Rubrik, Thumbtack, and Rover.
Slang
Slang is a B2B edtech company that teaches professional, industry-specific English to the global workforce. Born as an MIT research project on using AI and NLP to accelerate language learning, Slang now runs the largest catalog of specialized professional English courses in the world - 200+ paths spanning fields from engineering and finance to healthcare and logistics - delivered through a mobile-first platform used by companies and universities to build hyper-personalized learning journeys by role and industry.
Julia Stiglitz
Julia Stiglitz is the CEO and co-founder of Uplimit (formerly CoRise), an AI-native learning platform that lets companies build, run, and personalize training programs for thousands of employees at once. A fourth-grade teacher turned edtech operator, she was one of the first ten employees at Coursera, where she founded the enterprise business and helped grow the company past 40 million learners. She later managed Google Apps for Education and was a partner at GSV Ventures before starting Uplimit in 2021 with fellow Coursera alumni. Her bet: that AI can finally make high-quality, personalized education a renewable resource rather than a scarce one.
Uplimit
Uplimit is an AI-native enterprise learning platform that helps companies upskill employees and customers at scale. Born from the online course startup CoRise, the company rebuilt itself around generative AI in 2023 and now offers purpose-built AI agents for skill-building, program management, and teaching support - automating course authoring, real-time feedback, and cohort management so a single team can train thousands of learners simultaneously. Led by ex-Coursera enterprise founder Julia Stiglitz, Uplimit reports course completion rates of 75-94%, far above typical e-learning, and serves customers including GE HealthCare, Kraft Heinz, Procore, Databricks, Gusto, and Clay.
Babbel
Babbel is a Berlin-based language learning company that teaches 14 languages through short, expert-designed lessons built for real-life conversation. Founded in 2007 and operated under the legal name Lesson Nine GmbH, it pioneered the paid subscription model for language apps and has sold tens of millions of subscriptions worldwide. Its lessons - typically 10 to 15 minutes - are written by linguists rather than crowdsourced or generated, and the company has layered in speech recognition and AI speaking practice while keeping human-designed pedagogy at the center.
Steve Gilman
Steve Gilman is the co-founder and CEO of OneRange, a New York-based AI-powered upskilling platform that lets employees discover, get approval for, and buy the learning resources they need, with companies paying only when people actually learn. Before software, Gilman was drafted by the Detroit Tigers out of Yale and then served as a Defense Intelligence Agency intelligence officer working counterproliferation missions out of US embassies in Cairo and Abu Dhabi. He frames OneRange as importing the world-class skill-development methods of pro sports and the military into the corporate world, and the company now works with 25-plus enterprises including Google, Wasserman, and Caylent.
Tom Griffiths
Tom Griffiths is the CEO and co-founder of Hone, a live, cohort-based talent development platform that trains managers at companies like Indeed, ConocoPhillips, and Aramark. Before Hone, he co-founded daily fantasy sports company FanDuel and ran product for a decade as Chief Product Officer, helping pioneer a new category and grow it into a billion-dollar business with millions of users. A Cambridge computer scientist who left a machine learning PhD in Edinburgh to chase a startup, he now builds technology that teaches human skills.