Climb Credit is a New York-based fintech lender that finances career-focused education such as coding bootcamps, trucking, healthcare, cosmetology and aviation programs. It partners with vocational schools to offer private loans and interest-free recurring payment plans, using an AI-driven credit model built on more than 150 data points so applicants with limited credit history can still qualify. Founded in 2014, Climb has funded tens of thousands of learners and vets partner schools to ensure programs actually improve graduates' earning potential.
Gloat is an enterprise HR-technology company that pioneered the internal talent marketplace: an AI platform that maps a company's people by their skills rather than their job titles, then matches them to internal roles, projects, gigs and mentorships. Founded in 2015 in Tel Aviv (originally as Workey) by Ben Reuveni, Amichai Schreiber and Danny Shteinberg, Gloat now runs on a proprietary Workforce Graph and has expanded into skills intelligence and agentic HR tools used by global enterprises such as Mastercard, Unilever, Novartis, Spotify and HSBC. It has raised roughly $190 million, including a $90M Series D led by Generation Investment Management.
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.
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.
Reejig is an enterprise workforce-intelligence company that has repositioned itself as a Work Operating System for AI-powered work. Founded in Sydney in 2019 and now headquartered in New York, it maps every job, task and workflow inside an organisation into a structured Work Ontology and Work Context Graph, then uses independently audited Ethical AI to help companies redesign work, deploy AI agents, and measure the hours and value unlocked. It works with large enterprises such as Salesforce, Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson and Mastercard, and pursues a mission it calls Zero Wasted Potential.
Spire.AI is an enterprise AI company whose full-stack SaaS platform is powered by a single, domain-intelligent Generative Skills AI engine. Built on a live knowledge graph with more than 14 million skill-adjacency edges, it helps large organizations acquire, deploy, reskill, mobilize and retain talent in a skills-first way. Founded in 2007 by Saurabh Jain and Shweta Jain and headquartered in Bengaluru, India, the company has evolved its research into OpenKnowra, a context-intelligence layer that pairs enterprise understanding with autonomous execution.
Ziplines Education is a San Carlos, California-based career accelerator that partners with universities to deliver flexible, cohort-based online non-credit certificate courses in high-growth fields like AI, project management, digital marketing, business analytics, and Salesforce administration. Founded in 2017 as GreenFig and relaunched as Ziplines Education in 2024 under CEO Sara Leoni, the company blends live instruction, on-demand content, and real-world work simulations to help adult learners close the gap between traditional education and the skills the digital workforce actually demands.
Nestor is an AI-powered, skills-based talent management platform - a self-described People Intelligence Platform - that helps HR leaders, managers, and employees map, activate, and deploy the skills inside an organization. Built around a market library of 20,000+ skills and an AI companion, Nestor connects performance management, employee engagement, and career development so companies can spot skill gaps, run an internal talent marketplace, and make workforce decisions based on capability rather than job titles.
Forte is a New York-based social enterprise that finances reskilling and workforce development at no cost to individuals or governments and without relying on philanthropy. Founded by Dr Nat Ware on an idea he developed during his economics PhD at Oxford, Forte (Financing Of Return To Employment) sits between funders of education and training and the providers who deliver it, so funders 'never fund failure' - they only pay when people are trained and placed into better jobs. Repayment is tied to the future income-tax uplift generated by newly employed workers. Forte has run programs across Australia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, the United States and Peru, and its model has been endorsed by the World Economic Forum.
Nat Ware is an Australian economist and social entrepreneur, the founder and CEO of Forte, a New York-based company that finances education, reskilling and healthcare at zero cost to individuals or governments. An Oxford PhD and Rhodes Scholar, he invented the Forte (Financing Of Return To Employment) mechanism, where governments repay training costs only out of the additional income-tax revenue that newly employed graduates generate. He earlier built 180 Degrees Consulting into the world's largest consultancy for nonprofits and social enterprises. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and three-time TEDx speaker, he calls his approach trickle-up economics.
Jamie Albers is the co-founder and co-CEO of Mento, a Los Angeles career-health company that pairs people with coaches who blend 80% coaching and 20% hands-on mentorship from operators who have done the job before. A University of Pennsylvania grad who spent five years across Google and then ran growth and marketing at Jigsaw, she built Mento after her own executive coach reshaped how she led and felt at work. Mento has raised about $11.5M, including a $6M seed in 2023 backed by M13, and is now folding AI into coaching to make high-quality guidance affordable at scale.
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.
STRIVR is a Santa Clara workforce-performance company that began by putting Stanford quarterbacks in virtual reality and now puts AI on the factory floor. After pioneering enterprise VR training for Fortune 1000 giants like Walmart, Verizon and Bank of America, STRIVR has shifted from preparing people for work to guiding them inside the flow of work - building hands-free, smart-glasses AI that detects and corrects operational mistakes in real time and turns expert know-how into instant visual instructions.
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.
Ironhack is a global tech school offering intensive bootcamps in web development, data analytics, UX/UI design, cybersecurity, AI engineering and more. Founded in 2013, it runs on-campus programs across cities in Europe, Latin America and the US plus a remote track, pairing immersive project-based training with embedded career services and a network of hiring partners to move career-changers into tech jobs quickly.