mobile-learning
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Trala Taught a Phone to Hear a Violin - and Learned Where Software Stops
The Chicago startup began with an algorithm and a bad assumption about its customer. Its pivot from grading violinists to teaching adult beginners is a useful playbook for any founder turning expert craft into software.
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.
The Homework Camera That Became Indonesia's $27 Million Bet on Better Math
CoLearn turned a familiar after-school problem - a student stuck on one equation - into a mobile funnel for live, small-group tutoring. Its wager is that Indonesia's education gap is not only about access, but confidence, explanation and the quality of the teacher on the other side of the screen.
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.
Disprz
Disprz is an AI-powered corporate learning and skilling platform that bundles a learning management system, a learning experience platform, a content hub, frontline enablement and analytics into one suite - and now layers an agentic AI product called Turo on top that builds, localises and publishes training content on its own. Founded in 2015 in India as Learntron and renamed Disprz in 2017, the company sells per-learner subscriptions to more than 500 enterprises across 20-plus countries, reaching over 3.5 million learners at employers including Amazon, Petronas, Axis Bank, Starbucks, Carlsberg, GE Aviation and Emirates NBD. Its wedge is the workforce most learning software ignores: the deskless, multilingual, high-churn frontline in retail, banking, logistics and pharma across India, Southeast Asia and the Gulf. Disprz crossed Rs 100 crore in annual recurring revenue in April 2025 and is targeting Rs 200 crore by 2028, having raised roughly $45M-$52M across four disclosed rounds, most recently a $30M Series C co-led by Lumos Capital Group and 360 ONE Asset.
YOOBIC
YOOBIC is a frontline employee experience platform that unifies task management, communications, and mobile learning in a single app for retail, hospitality, grocery, and other deskless workforces. Founded in London in 2014 by brothers Fabrice, Avi, and Gilles Haiat, the company helps head offices push consistent store execution while giving frontline teams the tools, training, and information they need to serve customers. YOOBIC has layered generative AI across its platform - including its NEO assistants and Store Manager Copilot - and is used by 350+ enterprise brands and around 2 million users across roughly 80 countries.
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.
Ruchir Shah
Ruchir Shah is the founder and CEO of SkillCat, a mobile-first training platform that has taught more than 300,000 people to enter skilled trades like HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and appliance repair. A Rice-trained energy engineer with a Stanford MBA, he started building animated industrial simulations after researching the BP oil spill and concluding that bad training kills. His first company, LearnToDrill, trained 25,000 oil and gas workers for clients like Halliburton and BP. When COVID threw skilled workers out of jobs while contractors begged for help, Shah pivoted to SkillCat to bridge that gap with simulation-based, $10-a-month trade education. He also runs the GRIT Foundation to introduce trades careers to underserved youth, and once spent a summer doing stand-up comedy in New York.
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.
Imprint
Imprint is a New York based education company behind a visual microlearning app that turns dense subjects - psychology, philosophy, history, finance, science - into illustrated, bite-sized lessons you can finish in under 10 minutes a day. Built by mobile entertainment veteran Daniel Terry and developed under the legal entity Polywise, Inc., the app pairs original animation with daily quizzes and visual guides to bestselling nonfiction books. It became one of the highest grossing and most decorated learning apps, winning Google Play's Best App of 2023 and earning Apple Editors' Choice recognition.
Liulishuo
Liulishuo (LAIX Inc.) is a Shanghai-based educational technology company that uses artificial intelligence to teach English. Its flagship app, 'English Liulishuo' (known internationally as LingoChamp), pairs proprietary speech-recognition and deep-learning models with an adaptive curriculum to act as a personal 'AI English Teacher.' Founded in 2012 by three engineers with Google and academic backgrounds, the company grew to tens of millions of registered users and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2018.
Brilliant.org
Brilliant.org is an interactive STEM learning platform that teaches math, science, data, and computer science through hands-on problems instead of passive video. Founded in 2012 by Sue Khim, the San Francisco-based company has grown to roughly 10 million learners and operates on a freemium subscription model with 90+ guided courses.
Nellie Wartoft
Nellie Wartoft is a Swedish technology entrepreneur and the CEO and founder of Tigerhall, a Change Activation Platform that helps Fortune 500 companies drive organizational transformation at scale using AI and social learning. She moved from a small Swedish village to Singapore at 18 with a one-way ticket, spent 4.5 years as a top billing recruiter at Michael Page, then built Tigerhall from scratch into a platform operating across 32 countries, backed by Sequoia Capital and Monk's Hill Ventures with over $10 million in venture capital. Before her tech career she was a Swedish national champion in skeet shooting and air rifle.
Quizlet
Quizlet is an American education technology company that built the world's most-used flashcard app and is now retooling itself as an AI-powered study coach. Founded in 2005 by a 15-year-old high schooler studying for a French final, it has grown into a platform used by tens of millions of students each month across more than 130 countries.
Cambly Inc.
Cambly is an on-demand English tutoring platform that connects learners in 190+ countries with native English-speaking tutors available 24/7 via live video chat. Founded in 2012 by two former Google engineers, Cambly makes immersive English learning accessible and affordable - bringing the language-learning breakthrough of traveling abroad directly to any phone or laptop. With AI-powered personalization layered over millions of data points from a decade of real lessons, Cambly sits at the intersection of human connection and technology in the $60B+ global English education market.