Helping organisations upskill and retrain staff through adaptive learning, Obrizum raises $11.5 million

Cambridge-based Obrizum has raised $11.5 million in a Series A funding round. The startup helps large organisations upskill and retrain staff by employing AI to analyse and curate adaptive and tailored training programmes. Including this round, Obrizum has raised a total of $17 million.

The Series A round was led by Guinness Ventures and saw participation from  existing investors Beaubridge, Juno Capital Partners, and Qatar Science & Tech Holdings, alongside new investor Celeres Ventures. 

Given that the corporate training market is expected to grow to $487 billion by 2030, a figure that could waver given the current economic climate, as some companies downscale, the need to do more with less is, and will continue to become more apparent.

However, according to Obrizum, they are currently unable to create learning programmes quickly enough to match their skills development needs. And this is exactly the problem they are addressing.

While still leveraging existing corporate learning material, Obrizum’s solution uses AI to integrate other useful content including  PDF documents, videos, podcasts, slide decks, infographics, and virtual reality, culminating in a specifically tailored to this new reality, ultimately saving businesses time, money and rapidly upskilling their workforce while dramatically reducing manual effort for human operators. 

“Given that human capital costs are almost always one of the highest outgoing expenses in any business, not having a highly trained workforce who have easy access to the information they need to upskill fast is costing enterprises hundreds of millions of dollars every year and limiting their growth potential,” says Obrizum CEO and co-founder Chibeza Agley.

He goes on to explain, “We founded Obrizum because we knew existing systems of learning and training would not withstand the ever-expanding and rapidly changing global body of knowledge. We have since been proven right in our predictions that automation would be crucial, time would be at a premium, personalisation would be a requirement rather than a luxury and data would be the most precious of all commodities.”

Obrizum is trusted by clients including Barclays, SQA, the University of Cambridge, Merck, and PWC, to name a few.

On the investment, Guinness Ventures’ Shane Gallwey commented, “Obrizum’s adaptive learning technology not only cuts training times for large enterprises but ensures better learning outcomes.  The return on investment for enterprises who use their technology is startling and explains the take-up of Obrizum by household names here in Europe and the USA.  At Guinness we recognise the Obrizum management team as insightful and driven, and with a strong commercial appreciation of what is required to build a world class business in the education technology field.”