e-learning
(85)
Ocean Technologies Group built a classroom that goes to sea
A million seafarers, a library of maritime lessons and a growing stack of crew software: Ocean Technologies Group made training part of running a fleet. Now inside OneOcean, its next test is making those pieces work together.
Elai Turns the Training Deck Into a Talking Head
Elai gives the dreary slide deck a presenter, a voice and a passport. For learning teams buried in updates and translations, that trade can be genuinely useful - as long as nobody mistakes an avatar for an actor.
John Dunavan Built Learning Systems for 2,000 Therapists. Now He Wants Knowledge to Behave More Like a Conversation.
Across two decades in learning and development, John Dunavan has kept returning to one stubborn idea: useful knowledge should move at the speed of the people who need it.
The Dental School Dropout Who Turned 1,400 Flashcards Into 27 Million Students
Alec Whitters quit dental school in Iowa to rebuild exam prep on a phone screen. A decade later, roughly half of America's new nurses study on the platform he started - and he did it from a town most investors can't find on a map.
Mohammad Almadani Built Classera for the Places the Internet Barely Reached
A dorm-room partnership became a learning platform used across more than 40 countries. Almadani's wager is simple: education technology matters most when it works under imperfect conditions.
Deb Hannah Keeps Changing the Aisle
From Kotex packaging and Starbucks snack shelves to Shoe Carnival’s customer data and K12’s virtual classrooms, Deb Hannah has spent a career studying how a choice gets made - then rebuilding the path around it.
The Teacher Who Kept Marketing to Teachers
He taught eighth grade for nine years and was named Teacher of the Year. Then he spent the next two decades convincing the world's biggest education brands to market like they still remembered the classroom.
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.
Thinkific
How a lawyer's $29 LSAT course became a public 'learning commerce' company powering 35,000 course businesses.
LearnWorlds
The Greek-Cypriot company betting that online courses should feel less like a video dump and more like a school - and giving 12,000 creators the tools to build one.
BiggerBlueButton L.L.C
Run stable online classes and meetings without managing servers.
Atomi
Atomi is a Sydney-based edtech company that runs an online teaching and learning platform for high school. It pairs short, curriculum-aligned videos with interactive quizzes, AI-driven revision recommendations and real-time analytics, serving students, teachers and schools across Australia and the UK. Founded in 2013 as HSC Hub by Rob Barakat and Thomas O'Donahoo, the company now reaches over a million students and teachers and covers hundreds of subjects across all high school year levels.
ArcLab
ArcLab is a Singapore-based mobile learning SaaS platform built for the frontline deskless workforce - the roughly 2.7 billion workers who don't sit at desks. Organisations use its AI-powered tools to turn documents into bite-sized 'nano learning' modules, deliver them on mobile in any language, and track uptake, compliance and skills gaps. It serves construction, logistics, manufacturing, food & beverage, retail and non-profit teams across Southeast Asia.
Exly
Exly is an all-in-one business platform for coaches, trainers, consultants and creators to launch, sell and manage knowledge products - courses, webinars, workshops, e-communities and 1:1 consultations. Spun out of the YC W19-backed startup MyScoot, the Delhi-based company gives solo experts a no-code website, built-in CRM, payment collection and marketing tools so they can run the business side of their practice without stitching together five different apps.
Sanford Kenyon
Sanford Kenyon is an education-technology executive who led BloomBoard, a Pittsburgh-based company that helps teachers advance their careers and pay by earning micro-credentials tied to real classroom practice. After roughly five years in executive roles at PayPal and eBay, he spent more than a decade in K-12 software - as President & CEO of SchoolMessenger (Reliance Communications) and a VP in Blackboard's K-12 business - before joining BloomBoard in 2015 as Chief Revenue Officer and becoming CEO in early 2017.
Geniebook
Geniebook is a Singapore-based edtech company that pairs a proprietary AI engine with human teachers to deliver personalised learning for primary and secondary students across Southeast Asia. Its platform generates adaptive worksheets that target each student's specific knowledge gaps, streams live online classes led by experienced educators, and offers real-time teacher chat support - all aligned to Singapore's national (MOE) curriculum. Founded by former tutors Neo Zhizhong and Alicia Cheong, the company has grown from an offline tuition business into a regional platform serving more than 220,000 students, and has since expanded into hybrid online-plus-physical learning centres.
Praktika.ai
Praktika.ai is an AI-powered language learning app that lets people practice speaking through conversations with personalized AI avatar tutors. Instead of the tap-and-match drills common to language apps, Praktika simulates the responsive, spoken back-and-forth of a private tutor - complete with realistic voices, accents and emotional inflection - at roughly $8 a month versus hundreds for a human tutor. Founded by the team behind AI service firm Cleverbots, the company reports over 30 million learners, 1.2 million monthly active users across 100 countries, and raised a $35.5M Series A led by Blossom Capital in May 2024.
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.
Zenius
Zenius was Indonesia's pioneering education-technology company, founded in 2004 as a Jakarta tutoring center and reborn in 2010 as one of the country's first video-based learning platforms. Built around founder Sabda PS's belief that education should teach fundamental skills and critical thinking rather than rote memorization, Zenius grew into a digital learning ecosystem with a library of more than 100,000 video lessons, a large UTBK question bank, AI-powered tools like ZenCore and ZenBot, and live classes. After acquiring legacy tutoring brand Primagama in 2022 to push into hybrid learning, the company struggled with the post-pandemic funding downturn and suspended operations in January 2024 after roughly 20 years.
Daniel Blackman
Daniel Blackman is the founder and CEO of Smashcut, a next-generation online learning platform built for real-time, media-based education in the visual and media arts. An NYU Tisch film school graduate, he spent years in executive roles at Google, YouTube, The Daily Beast, Barnes & Noble.com and HarperCollins before co-founding the instructional video company Howcast and, later, Smashcut. Backed by a $7M Series A from Pearson Ventures, Smashcut partners with universities like NYU Tisch to bring collaborative filmmaking and documentary education online.
Boundless Learning
Boundless Learning is a Boston-headquartered education technology company that designs and manages online degree programs, short courses, and workforce-aligned learning for universities and organizations worldwide. Spun out of Pearson Online Learning Services after private-equity firm Regent LP acquired the unit in 2023, the company builds and operates more than 450 online programs serving roughly 17,000 learners across 150-plus countries, with marquee short-course partnerships including three schools at the University of Oxford. Led by CEO Joshua Richards, it operates in the Online Program Management (OPM) market, handling everything from recruitment and course design to technology and learner support so academic partners can extend their reach online.
OpenClassrooms
OpenClassrooms is a Paris-based online education company that turns coursework into jobs. Founded in 2013 by Pierre Dubuc and Mathieu Nebra out of the tutorial site Le Site du Zéro, it offers hundreds of free courses plus accredited, mentor-supported degree and apprenticeship programs in fields like data, AI, cybersecurity and web development. A certified B Corp with roughly 2.5 million monthly users, the company pairs project-based online learning with real-world work placements and a network of thousands of expert mentors, positioning itself as an education-to-employment platform rather than a video-course catalog.
Opus Training
Opus Training is a New York-based, AI-powered mobile training platform built for the frontline, deskless workforce - the servers, cooks, housekeepers, grocery clerks and factory staff who rarely sit at a desk. Founded by CEO Rachael Nemeth, Opus delivers bite-sized, mobile-first lessons and standard operating procedures directly to workers' phones, onboards staff faster, auto-translates content into 100+ languages, and tracks training completion across every location in real time. It replaces binders and legacy LMS tools with training that lives where frontline employees actually work.
Rouxbe Online Culinary School
Rouxbe is an online culinary school founded in Vancouver in 2005 that teaches cooking through high-definition video, expert instructors, peer feedback and interactive assignments. It serves home cooks, aspiring professionals, health and wellness practitioners, and institutions across more than 180 countries, and is best known for its accredited Professional Cook and Plant-Based Professional certification courses.
Gary Apito
Gary Apito is the Chief Executive Officer of Rouxbe, the online culinary school that has trained more than one million students across 180 countries. A career culinary-education operator, he spent seventeen years helping build the French Culinary Institute and International Culinary Center in New York before moving into online learning, joining Rouxbe in 2016 and rising from VP of Operations to COO to CEO. His focus is scaling professional-grade cooking instruction through high-definition video as traditional brick-and-mortar culinary schools close worldwide.
Joshua Richards
Joshua Richards is the Chief Executive Officer of Boundless Learning, a Boston-based online program management and edtech company spun out of Pearson. He rose to the top job in January 2025 after serving as the company's Chief Product and Technology Officer and helping steer its transition into a standalone business. With more than two decades in technology and education, Richards leads a company serving roughly 17,000 learners across 150+ countries and having launched more than 450 online programs, focused on driving learner success through personalization and helping universities and institutions reach new audiences.
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.
Filadd
Filadd is a Córdoba, Argentina-based edtech company (Y Combinator S21) that helps Latin American students pass college entrance exams and graduate from university. Its platform blends video lessons, live tutoring, AI-powered study plans, and downloadable resources to prepare students for regional exams like Chile's PAES and Brazil's ENEM. Filadd serves more than 25,000 students a year across Chile, Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia.
BloomBoard
BloomBoard is a Pittsburgh-based education technology company that helps K-12 school districts grow, advance, and retain their own educators. Its platform turns on-the-job classroom experience into pathways for teacher certification and college degrees, pairing districts with higher-education partners so paraprofessionals, substitutes, and support staff can earn credentials while continuing to work and get paid. Built originally around competency-based micro-credentials developed with the nonprofit Digital Promise, BloomBoard now runs turnkey, district-branded 'Your-District U' programs aimed at solving the national teacher shortage from within.
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.