elearning
(21)
Articulate makes the dress rehearsal for work
A tractor, a hotel and a $1.5 billion funding round explain the appeal of Articulate: giving people somewhere to practise before the real job begins.
Belitsoft and the expensive art of getting software to work
A bot-battered website, a testing backlog and a learning platform with millions of users reveal what Belitsoft sells: engineers who learn the business before they change the code.
Vyond turned office explanations into a cast of characters
A cartoon company discovered that the serious money was in helping people explain their work. Its next act pairs AI video generation with the unglamorous controls that make a video usable inside a business.
iSpring Solutions turns PowerPoint into a training department
The familiar slide deck is iSpring’s unlikely advantage. Its tools let the people who know the work build the lessons, then give employers a way to deliver and track them.
iSpring MEA and the Secret Life of a Slide Deck
The Arabic-facing iSpring operation has a practical proposition: turn the presentations people already know how to make into training people can actually use. The interesting part is who gets to do the making.
Tommy Graunke Built a Golf Club for the Hours the Sun Forgot
He learned digital attention in e-learning and gaming, then found a stubbornly physical problem in Dallas: serious golfers had nowhere nearby to practise before dawn or after dark. Scratch Golf Club became his answer.
The Message Was Fine. The Channel Was Wrong.
KAT & Company found an overlooked place for public-health marketing: the minutes when people are already waiting, watching, and willing to listen. Its advantage is not simply making the message - it is owning the last mile.
VinciWorks wants your staff to stop clicking and start thinking
The compliance company built its early business around a pact between law firms. Now it sells editable courses, automated workflows and AI conversations - with a railway training overhaul showing what the combination can do.
The Marketing Paratrooper Who Finally Chose to Stay
For a decade, Tanya White entered technology companies during their messiest chapters, steadied the marketing function, and handed it back. Then OpenSesame gave the self-described paratrooper a reason to unpack.
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.
ProProfs
The bootstrapped software company that turned a free online quiz into a 15-million-user suite for training employees and keeping customers happy.
Pierre Dubuc
He was 11 when he started building a website to teach people how to code. Two decades later that hobby is OpenClassrooms, and Pierre Dubuc still measures its worth in one thing - jobs.
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.
Gjergj Demiraj
Gjergj Demiraj is the President and CEO of Gutenberg Technology, a Boston-based edtech company whose end-to-end content management platform helps publishers and enterprises author, reuse, and distribute learning content at scale. A polyglot with an international consulting background in finance, telecom, and media, he joined the company in 2012, opened its US office in Boston in 2016, and took the top job in 2019 after helping shape the business across every department. He co-founded the French crowdfunding platform Anaxago and earlier advised global publishing groups on digital transformation at EidosMedia in Milan and Paris.
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.
ModernGuild
ModernGuild is a New York-based career mentoring and recruiting company that helps early-career and college students break into finance and consulting. Founded in 2011-2012 by Adrien Fraise, it pairs online career curriculum with live 1-on-1 coaching from in-field practitioners, and has evolved into a B2B marketplace using blinded candidate dashboards and matching algorithms to reduce bias in campus recruiting.
Study.com
Study.com is a Mountain View-based online learning platform that breaks subjects into short, animated video lessons and college-credit-eligible courses. Founded in 2002 by Adrian Ridner and Ben Wilson, it now serves more than 30 million learners, teachers and working adults each month, with one of the largest catalogs of ACE-approved courses of any provider. Its mission is to make education accessible and affordable - especially for the underserved students its founder once was.
Cindy Mi
Cindy Mi is the founder and CEO of VIPKid, a Beijing-based edtech unicorn that connects Chinese children aged 4-12 with North American English teachers through live one-on-one video lessons. A high-school dropout turned billionaire builder, she started tutoring English peers at age 15, co-founded an English academy chain at 17, and by 2020 had grown VIPKid to over 800,000 students, 100,000 teachers, and a $4 billion-plus valuation - backed by Tencent, Sequoia, and the late Kobe Bryant.
Kurt Beidler
Kurt Beidler is the Chief Executive Officer of Quizlet, the AI-powered learning platform used by hundreds of millions of students worldwide. Appointed in July 2024, he brings 17 years of Amazon experience scaling subscription businesses - most notably growing Amazon Kids+ into the world's largest youth-focused subscription service and launching Kindle into China. Under his leadership, Quizlet has grown revenue to $139M annually while aggressively integrating AI tools including a native ChatGPT app integration, lecture recording features, and an OpenAI partnership aimed at keeping students' entire study workflow on one platform.