Edtech 20:20 vision: the top 40 emerging companies for workforce development in 2023
Workforce development edtech is a busy space, and it can be hard to keep up with innovation. At Emerge Education, we want to help you see clearly.
Members of our Workforce Development Edtech Leadership Board, chaired by Donald H Taylor and in partnership with Coursera, tell us that keeping up to date with the best emerging edtech companies in L&D is difficult, confusing and overwhelming. So every year, we publish a list of top edtech companies — crowdsourced from our WD edtech leadership board and further afield — to help HR leaders see what is out there.
By highlighting great practice, we hope to encourage innovation.
We asked 100+ workforce development leaders: why is knowing about emerging edtech companies important to you?
We launched this year’s Edtech 20:20 vision list with an open session run by HR Leaders and chaired by Donald H Taylor, who interviewed Amanda Nolen (cofounder, NilesNolen), Guillermo Miranda (Business Management Professor, Advantere School of Management) and Tariq Chauhan (Group CEO at EFS Facilities) for their expert insights. Donald, Amanda, Guillermo and Tariq are all part of our Venture Partner community with a special interest in workforce development. We’ll be interspersing the list below with some of their comments. You can watch the full session on the HR Leaders platform.
The big players
Before we dig into our list of emerging companies, let’s look at the gold standard in WD edtech.
These are the established players — you’ll probably recognise most, if not all, of these names. Every company here has raised $100s of millions and improved access to opportunities for millions of learners around the world. We believe that the emerging companies we will now highlight have the potential to be just as transformational.
The WD edtech 20:20 list
Quick overview:
- 46% of these companies are from Europe, but all are selling globally
- They span 2013–2023, with an average age of 5 years
- Funds raised per company vary from just starting out to $100m, with a total combined fundraising of more than $1.2bn
- Between them, they have created more than 10,000 jobs
- 18 of these companies are new entrants and didn’t feature on the 2021–22 list
Diversity:
- 1 in 6 founders are women
- 25% of founders are people of colour
- This compares to tech industry averages of 1–2%
Methodology:
The list is based on public and private data. Crunchbase and Pitchbook are primary data sources where we capture company valuation, funding raised, HQ location and employee data. We leverage LinkedIn as a secondary source for employee data. Lastly, as an edtech-specialist venture firm, Emerge Education captures our own proprietary data that we use to complete our analysis. The list is crowdsourced and voted on by our WD edtech leadership board. Inclusion criteria include:
- Breadth and quality of courses/content /pedagogy
- Quality of features and capabilities
- Industry visibility, innovation and impact
- Strength of clients and geographic reach
- Company size and growth potential
To help you make comparisons, we have divided the list into three sections:
Top 10 “Superstars”
- These companies have been around the longest, on average 8 years
- They have raised more than $50m and are established players
Top 20 “Rising Stars”
- These companies are emerging and starting to make a significant impact
- They have raised between $15m and $50m
Top 10 “ones to watch”
- These companies are new players
- Some were only founded in the last 12 months
- The average age is 2 years
- We think they have the potential to be game changers
Every year, you will be able to see the progress that companies make across these sections — as well as easily picking out exciting new entrants.
But of course, categorisation is difficult! There are inevitably some overlaps and some gaps. This list is by no means perfect, and it’s not comprehensive — it’s simply a snapshot. We’ll run this list each year, so we are continuously tracking all the companies in our full dataset, and every 12 months, this process will update — you will be able to see companies graduate from one list to the next as they grow in size and impact, watch new players enter the fray and catch the emergence of whole new edtech categories as innovation takes workforce development in new directions. Share your thoughts, ideas and comments to tell us about companies we may have missed or should consider next time.
The WD edtech 20:20 list by category
Career navigation infrastructure & skills assessment
Briefly: This bundles two categories that go hand in hand. Skills assessment is about developing the capability to understand where people are starting from so that companies can more effectively hire and support them. We might also refer to this as skills intelligence platforms or skills-based talent management. Career navigation infrastructure is the technology that helps organisations support existing employees move from A to B by leveraging skills assessment as a starting point, along with training and mentoring.
HR leader insights:
- “The concept of talent mobility is extremely important because bringing in different sources of talent is core to the success of companies. This is not just an organisational goal, but also a societal goal” — Guillermo Miranda.
- “This tech is in its infancy, but we are seeing progress. The limitations of learning tech up till now are that it has been in a bubble — it’s been missing the “for what” for companies and people. All of sudden, now we can say, ‘this learning is important for you in terms of career progression, you can get a promotion or get a pay rise”, or if we’re thinking lattice careers then it’s about keeping your job as it changes. What’s exciting is that skills become that common currency that allows internal mobility across companies.” — Amanda Nolen.
Highlights:
- FutureFitAI — “GPS for your career” — Canada, 2019, founders: Hamoon Ekhtiari, Terralynn Forsyth, Zeeshan Shahid. “This company is about how we’re able to get people from diverse backgrounds and diverse educational settings into higher-paying jobs. Needing specificity of skills is important, so they’re using tech and AI to make it happen.” — Guillermo Miranda.
- TechWolf — “Workforce planning platform to connect people, jobs and education based on skills” — Belgium, 2018, founders: Andreas De Neve, Jeroen Van Hautte, Mikaël Wornoo. “In the past, we’ve been building competency frameworks manually, which is very time-consuming, so by the time it’s built, it had already become obsolete. TechWolf and Retrain.ai scrape data from where people are doing their work (MS Teams, Slack, etc.) and make inferences about skills people have. They then add to that intelligence from the job market, companies from the same vertical and pull in future skills. This gives a company a picture of skills they have today, a skills inventory, to see where gaps are, and they attach to that meaningful learning journeys so people can upskill and reskill at pace. It’s an opportunity to take out the maintenance piece about competency frameworks” — Amanda Nolen.
- SkillsTrust — “Predictive tool that employers can use to prove a candidate’s readiness for the job” — Ireland, 2022, founders: Michelle Dervan. “Offers opportunity to assess people prior to joining the workplace by doing example tasks and showing that they could do the job. And doing this not ad hoc per department, but building a library of these things, which creates the possibility then of benchmarking” — Donald Taylor
Collaborative and applied learning & Coaching
Briefly: These categories feature companies that are usually (though not always) content-agnostic but instead focus on how we learn. Companies here are innovating to make learning more social, authentic, accessible, relevant and impactful.
HR leader insights:
- “One thing we can all agree on is that content consumed does not equal skills developed, and that’s been a big limitation of digital learning. So solutions building in application, practice, coaching and feedback at scale are exciting and can deliver a lot of value. Watch this space!” — Amanda Nolen.
- “A big emerging concept is orchestration, how you orchestrate the different pieces that will drive success and the right skills for the business. These platforms help to orchestrate. Without orchestration, it’s just a big cacophony of tools, and you don’t know where to start.” — Guillermo Miranda.
Highlights:
- SoundingBoard — “coaching management platform to help leaders reach their potential” — USA, 2016, founders: Lori Mazan, Christine Tao. “Sounding Board democratises access to leadership skills using digital coaching. Driving behavioural change is the holy grail of leadership development, but usually, only executives get leadership coaching. This is coaching for founders.” — Amanda Nolen.
- SanaLabs — “where fast-moving teams learn and share knowledge” — Sweden, 2016, founders: Joel Hellermark. “A next-gen LXP. There are pathways and a level of personalisation that goes beyond the traditional “here is content for you” or generic way of doing things.” — Guillermo Miranda.
- SparkWise — “Multiplayer learning platform designed for professionals to master skills together” — USA, 2020, founders: Ari Bader-Natal, Romain Lévy, Vince Jeong. “An escape room for teams. You’re given a challenge and teams have to work out how to solve the challenge themselves. It’s people learning from each other within the structure of a challenge they’ve been given.” — Donald H Taylor.
Skills development
Briefly: Skills acquisition programmes are usually (not always) agnostic about the types of skills they are delivering but strongly emphasise the delivery of skills. Here we also create space for companies that focus on specific areas of learning or skills or specific personas that more general platforms cannot cater for.
HR leader insights:
- “‘Meet me where I am’ is crucial. Focus on the user. The way to incentivise learners and help them recognise the value of proactive skills development is to offer career opportunities. If you manage people’s individual professional and business success together and offer the right skills for the future with the right component of professional success, that’s the winning formula. ‘This is a roadmap for you that will get you a promotion, that will get you an opportunity broader than you have now’.” — Guillermo Miranda.
- “Again, building in application and practise is crucial, not just building content. And also looking at specific groups of people and asking, what are their needs?” — Amanda Nolen.
Highlights:
- Enboarder — “onboarding platform designed to optimize hiring and employee engagement processes” — Australia, 2015, founders: Brent Pearson. “There’s this big, black box when companies spend time and energy to hire, and then as many as 50% of those new hires don’t show up for work on day 1. So what can we do to ensure we meet the needs of those individuals — keep them engaged, excited and learning before they enter the work location? There are huge opportunities there. It’s tricky, there are barriers to overcome when people are not yet employees, but companies are starting to see it’s a key area to invest in.” — Amanda Nolen.
- Colossyan — “enables users to create videos from text using AI” — USA, 2022, founders: Zoltan Kovaks, Kristof Szabo. “Colossyan innovate on the creation of L&D. They manage the cycle of content creation for specialist skills, at an extremely competitive pricepoint, using the latest AI tech. And there’s a wonderful autotranslation button for 29 languages.” — Guillermo Miranda.
- Junto — “offers live digital training” — Germany, 2022, founders: Marius Hepp, Johannes Schnell-Kretschmer. “Junto brings experts who’ve achieved in work to lead collaborative cohort-based learning. It’s all about people learning from each other, sparking learning in each other.” — Donald H Taylor.
Near misses on this year’s list
No single list can ever capture the full scope of innovation in this space — there will always have to be some exciting companies who miss out. Here are a few that caught our attention but didn’t quite make the cut this year, based on our methodology and selection criteria:
- Pandatron — “personalised change management at scale, with AI coaching” — Finland, 2016.
- RunYourself — “peer-to-peer leadership coaching at scale” — UK, 2022.
- Chapter — “accelerating the energy transition with a continuous learning, onboarding and recruitment platform for sustainable installers” — Netherlands, 2021.
- Elephant Company — “automate the creation and maintenance of high-quality learning experiences with the latest generative AI technology” — Germany, 2022
- Zavvy — all-in-one AI powered development, performance and engagement for SMEs — Germany, 2020
- Orgnostic — “people analytics for SMEs” — Serbia, 2019.
We are trying to create simplicity, not more complexity, so ideally this tech should be invisible — it should be middleware. One of the challenges will be how good providers are at integrating with broader HR infrastructure. Everyone will promise open APIs, but solutions need to actually be seamless for the end-user.” — Amanda Nolen.
Don’t forget, you can catch up on the whole discussion on the HR Leaders platform, and please let us know if you think we’ve missed any great companies — we will look at all suggestions!
Emerge Education welcomes inquiries from new investors and startup founders. For more information, visit emerge.education or email hello@emerge.education.
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