An Operating System for Skills — Why We Invested in Edyoucated
We are excited to lead a €2.1m Seed round for edyoucated in support of the four co-founders — Marius Venneann, David Middelbeck, Jannik Weichert, and Jan Papenbrock — previously backed by First Momentum and business angels such as the folks from Flaschenpost (Stephen Weich, Niklas Plath, Christopher Huesmann, Aron Spohr, and Julian Pachta), plus Personio co-founder, Ignaz Forstmeier.
Having met in university, edyoucated’s four co-founders envision their company as the leading workforce development platform, based on a granular understanding of skill-based learning and deep understanding educational technology. The corporate learning market still lacks individual-tailored solutions for upskilling and reskilling. To tackle this properly, it requires a founding team who re-thinks challenges from a sophisticated tech infrastructure perspective. That’s why we’re pumped to be part of the edyoucated’s journey in addressing this.
A Relatable Problem
We’ve all likely faced a familiar situation: when mastery of a new skill set would benefit us professionally and privately, yet we struggle to resolve that challenge or stay on board.
Figure 1 below displays the problem referenced here – current systems fail to provide customization that connects high quality content (at scale, at reasonable costs for employers) to the individual needs of learners. This can be seen as course providers such as edX and Coursera struggle to create long-term engagement with their customers, achieving only 15% or less completion rates of their open courses.
I can personally relate to this problem and understand the associated frustration. Learning and mastering new skills for work can feel painfully similar to the challenge of learning Latin vocabulary back in high school.
But every problem can also be considered an opportunity, especially if paired with an attractive addressable market that is estimated to be around $240 bn in global size. What makes this market so vast? The fourth industrial revolution has long been altering the workforce through ongoing automation of traditional industrial practices. The pandemic has exacerbated this trend, making it more urgent than ever for companies to upskill and reskill their employees. About 85% of all EU jobs today need some form of basic digital skills and by 2025, about half of all job opportunities in Europe will need to be filled by individuals with tertiary-level qualifications.
Upskilling the Workforce
This will require a massive upskilling of the existing workforce. While the past industrial revolutions centered around optimizing output and efficiency, the fourth industrial revolution will rely on optimizing intelligence. As a result of these industry changes, businesses have been investing heavily into upskilling and reskilling. Inefficiencies are still present though, as investment alone does not translate into systematic upskilling. To successfully train employees, relevant content must meet employee engagement; current systems fail to find the intersection between these two.
Going Beyond the Status Quo
If we know the problem an employee faces when learning a skill for his or her professional life, why is this not translated into a software that employers are offering?
The status quo is characterized by two systems: One is learning management systems (LMS- generally an administrative platform used to manage company learning) and learning experience platforms (LXP — a relatively new platform where content may be curated or personalized for learner experience). Most larger companies employ some sort of LMS/LXP mix, and a host of several content providers, and still struggle to innovate and therefore meet the needs of their employees. They are stuck refactoring old course formats leading to a plethora of inefficiencies.
Edyoucated stands out as an Operating System (OS) for skills that has much of the same functionality as a LMS and LXP, but puts the employee that wants to learn in focus, by understanding how and what they should learn.
In order to revolutionize software that corporates can use to train their employees, you must understand skills on a completely new level of granularity. This is what founders Marius Vennemann, David Middelbeck, Jannik Weichert, and Jan Papenbrock have accomplished through building a new technical infrastructure to enable truly personalized learning.
Their technology uses graph based infrastructure to break down a high-level skill (e.g. “Microsoft Excel”) into its “atomic parts” (smallest learnable components, e.g. “SUM function”). Edyoucated categorizes skill gains, not through high-level topics and levels, but rather through the granular parts necessary to master a skill.
Through their proprietary AI-based personalization framework POLARIS, edyoucated can then use these atomic skills to radically optimize skill assessments (i.e. accurately predicting a learners’ current knowledge for hundreds of “skill atoms’’ with just a few questions) as well as learning delivery (i.e. matching learners with exactly the right content to fill their skill gaps). With every single learning session on the platform, these prediction algorithms are retrained and improved over time, resulting in higher accuracy and learning effectiveness — thus exhibiting strong data network effects that help current and future users achieve their learning goals faster than ever before.
Based on a user’s skill gaps, edyoucated can use free, high-quality and expert-curated content on their platform or match learners with company-specific content that already exists internally. For edyoucated, this means providing the best content while keeping costs low, and being go-to-market ready much quicker.
Shaping the Future of Talent
Edyoucated’s product is based on an ambitious vision to shape the future of the workforce and empower employees to continuously innovate and adapt. These founders are super motivated to embolden talent by building the most reliable and trusted, go-to workforce development platform.
We are thrilled to join a team of entrepreneurs driven by their mission to catalyze the education game. As a team, edyoucated understands skills and employees with such specificity, that businesses are able to upskill and educate employees beyond current possibilities. We are stoked to join in edyoucated’s big vision to become THE workforce development platform.
Team edyoucated, welcome to the #EBVCgang! We can’t wait for the journey ahead.
To learn more about edyoucated or to join the growing team, please visit their website. To keep up with Earlybird and our portfolio companies, follow us on Twitter & Medium, or visit our homepage.
By Paul Klemm, Principal at Earlybird
