learning-and-development
(14)
Knowlify
Knowlify is a Y Combinator (S25) startup building a text-to-explainer video engine that turns documents, PDFs, textbooks and plain text into narrated, animated videos in minutes. Founded by four University of Florida classmates, the company offers a self-serve platform for teams plus a managed studio for high-stakes productions, and has generated over 200,000 videos for organizations including Amazon, ByteDance, Flexport, Supabase and Zoho. In October 2025 Knowlify raised $3 million to make video the default medium for explaining complex information.
HelloTeam
HelloTeam is a Boston-based HR technology company that builds an all-in-one employee engagement and performance management platform aimed at improving employee retention. Founded in 2016 by Tanya Bakalov, the software combines performance reviews, goals and OKRs, recognition and rewards, surveys, learning, a dynamic org chart, and people analytics into a single system so managers and HR teams can keep employees connected, engaged, and productive.
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.
100mentors
100mentors is an Athens-based company that helps organizations adopt generative AI - with people, not just tools, at the center. Founded in 2015 as an on-demand mentorship platform that connected 21,000+ students across 17 countries with 2,500+ mentors from top universities and companies, it pivoted with the rise of generative AI into an enterprise partner offering AI upskilling bootcamps (GenAI Academy), an AI-powered meeting tool (Wiserwork), and the GenAI Summit, positioned as one of Europe's largest generative-AI leadership conferences.
Pinnacle - AI Coaching
Pinnacle is a New York-based HR-tech startup building scalable AI coaching that lives inside the tools employees already use. Its AI coach, Pascal, embeds in Slack, Microsoft Teams, and video meetings to give managers and employees personalized, real-time guidance drawn from their actual work context - performance reviews, 360 feedback, company competency frameworks, and day-to-day communication patterns. Founded by former accelerator CEO and executive coach Alexei Dunaway, Pinnacle raised a $2.5M seed round in March 2025 to bring executive-grade coaching to every employee, not just the C-suite.
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.
Yiorgos Nikoletakis
Yiorgos Nikoletakis is the co-founder and CEO of 100mentors, an Athens- and San Francisco-based edtech company that started as a platform connecting young people with mentors worldwide and has since pivoted into generative-AI skilling for organizations. A Fulbright scholar with degrees from AUEB, Ohio State, and Columbia, he describes his job as teaching people to ask better questions, use GenAI well, and keep humans in the loop. His personal motto: arguing like he's right, listening like he's wrong.
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.
Leapsome
Leapsome is an AI-powered people enablement platform that unifies the HR stack - performance reviews, goals and OKRs, engagement surveys, learning, compensation, and a core HRIS - in one place. Founded in Berlin in 2016 by Jenny von Podewils and Kajetan von Armansperg, it helps managers and HR teams run feedback, development, and alignment processes without juggling spreadsheets and disconnected tools. The company bootstrapped to profitability before raising a $60M Series A in 2022, and today serves more than 1,500 organizations including Spotify, Unity, and monday.com.
OneRange
OneRange is a New York-based HR-tech company building a skills-first talent growth platform. It connects employees' career goals to in-demand skills, then uses AI to match them with the right learning resource from a marketplace of 22,000+ options - courses, books, conferences, certifications - while giving employers usage-based pricing, automated approvals, virtual payment cards, and real-time skill and spend analytics. The pitch: pay only for the learning people actually use, and put employees in the driver's seat of their own development.
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.
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.