The top emerging edtech companies for workforce development in 2024 — edtech 20:20 vision
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.
We are seeing native AI companies doing things at scale that simply couldn’t be done before. It’s like a Cambrian explosion — we’re seeing thousands of new species, and we don’t yet know which ones are going to flourish. This list does a great job of picking out the ones to watch. I can’t wait for next year to see what happens next!
Donald H. Taylor, Emerge VP and chair, WD Edtech Action Group
Every year, we publish a list of top emerging edtech companies — crowdsourced from our WD Edtech Action Group, chaired by Donald H. Taylor, and from our expert Venture Partner community, before subjecting the longlist to rigorous analysis. Our aim is to help organisations and senior leaders see what is out there.
There are so many amazing startups doing great work in edtech and the human capital space, but what I love about what Emerge’s WD Action Group has done is distil that down so we can understand some of the emerging technologies and companies, and look at opportunities for us to work with these organisations and try to find ways to partner with them. There is a lot going on with changing workforces and changing the way people work and learn. This list enables us to do things differently.
Tamar Elkeles, Emerge VP
Read on for:
- The full list of top emerging edtech companies, with summaries and insights
- Views from sector experts
- Spotlights showcasing exciting companies
- A series of market maps sketching out the landscape of key players
- You can watch the full session on LinkedIn Live
- We will shortly publish a piece showcasing ‘Ones to Watch’ — very early-stage companies that didn’t quite make the list this year but are working on exciting things!
The WD edtech 20:20 list
Quick overview:
- More than a quarter of companies on this list are new entrants (11) — they didn’t feature in our 2023 or 2022 lists
- Almost half of companies have either a female founder (4), a non-white founder (11) or both (4)
- 20/40 companies are from Europe, but all are selling globally
- The youngest company was founded in 2023, while the oldest was founded just over a decade ago
- Funds raised per company vary from just starting out to more than $80m, with a total combined fundraising of more than $1.5bn
Methodology:
The list is based on public and private data. Crunchbase, Pitchbook and Dealroom 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. 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 Action Group and our expert Venture Partners. 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: Superstars, Rising Stars and Future Stars.
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.
You don’t have to be doing a moonshot. If you’re doing something that people want and need, and you can do it at scale, that’s your ticket. I wouldn’t underestimate that at all.
Donald H. Taylor
Top 10 Superstars
- These companies have been around the longest, on average 7 years
- They have raised more than $50m each, and have big global customer bases
There are three big changes to our list here. In 2023, our Superstars included Career Karma, On Deck and SkyHive. Skills intelligence platform SkyHive was acquired by Cornerstone in May, while On Deck has unfortunately seen some layoffs since their Series A in 2021.
Now we have some new entrants:
- TechWolf, which announced a $43M series B in June in a round led by SAP, ServiceNow and Workday — three titans in HR. Last year, TechWolf was one of our Rising Stars, so it’s exciting to see them moving up a category this year. “The reason TechWolf has been successful is they’re providing something which other people are talking about but are not sure they’re doing well. I’ve talked to people who are using TechWolf to get some sense of what their skills taxonomy is, being able to update it regularly, and they are very happy not only with what TechWolf is providing but also the way they’re working with the company” — Donald H. Taylor
- Lepaya was also another Rising Star in our 2023 list. They have since strengthened their position as the largest corporate edtech provider in EMEA by raising $38M last September — the biggest round raised in this space in all of 2023.
SPOTLIGHT ON… ROI in learning
“There are measures for ROI; if you look at Kirkpatrick’s models and we go through levels of evaluation, there are ways to go ahead and do that. Unfortunately, I don’t think many CEOs understand how to measure or evaluate the effectiveness of learning programmes. From my 30 year career in this space, I’m not big on the ROI methodology. What I’m big on is showing the value of the investment. One of the problems that leaders have is communicating that value. There are three key levers we always talked about: traction, engagement and retention. But there’s also some productivity measures and some performance measures that employers can look at. It’s really important for whatever measure we’re going to use, that you’re consistent with those year over year. They have to be replicable year over year.”
Tamar Elkeles, Emerge VP
For programmes with a lot of frontline workers, it’s a lot about the impact of retention — what’s the cost of bringing in someone new versus the cost of being able to invest and have someone stay? Employer brand value is significant. And a third element is additional productivity, tracking impacts in terms of business outcomes related to the skills people are developing. But in terms of a perfect map, as with measuring all ROI and learning programmes, there’s always some magic. Those are the main metrics to measure.
Sylvie Milverton, co-founder, Lynx Educate
Productivity — how can we make the workforce even more productive — if you have efficient and effective learning, that frees up so much time in your workforce to apply in whatever way you want. That’s a big win. It’s always surprising to me how much that’s overlooked.
Susan Steele, chair, Filtered and Emerge VP
Top 20 Rising Stars
- These companies are building momentum and starting to make significant impact
- They have raised between $15m and $50m each
Here we start to find a new species of company that isn’t adopting AI or starting to include AI features, as we might find from more established players in the lists above — the companies here are AI-first. Such as UK-based Metaview (AI-powered summaries and analysis of interviews), which raised a series A in March 2024. Or another promoted company, Colossyan (AI video generator for learning content creation); in 2023, they were one of our ones to watch and in February 2024, they raised their own $22M series A.
An important and very welcome trend here is the focus on frontline workers and the increased willingness to spend dollars at the bottom of the pyramid, not just on senior executives and ‘high-potentials’, as AI enables high-quality learning and training at scale. Alongside several companies in this space, one new entrant is DeepHow, which focuses on frontline workers using AI to turn technical know-how into smart how-to training videos and raised $14M last year.
SPOTLIGHT ON… LYNX EDUCATE
“Lynx is an education benefits platform — we help companies retain workers by differentiating their benefits offer. We operate a marketplace where we give companies a curated catalogue of certified education programmes from top providers and align those catalogues with programmes that match company goals, for example to scale employees into hard-to-fill roles, or to help early-career or frontline workers build up career pathways.
By positioning it as a benefit, the company is investing in its people and employees can choose what they want to pursue, combined with a learning offer that’s strategically aligned to business goals — that’s where you see outsized outcomes in terms of retention, business impact, employee engagement. Where employees can continue to grow with their existing employer or be prepared for new opportunities in the future.
Fundamentally, the problem we’re solving is building a talent pipeline in a company through education. How are we different in how we’re solving that? One is the type of catalogue. What companies have now is platforms with access to large catalogues of programmes focused on learning about something in a couple of hours — our platform gives access to deeper learning programmes, certificates, bootcamps, where you’re trying to become something new. Second is the kind of learner. Often companies are offering this kind of learning to high-potentials and senior executives, focused on white collar jobs. If you can get to a different level of employees, that’s where you’re getting outsized outcomes. Most companies have a promotion rate 5–10% per year. What if you had a tool where 5% of workers have the opportunity to pursue deeper learning and pursue a career path? You’re fundamentally changing the way that you’re building a talent pipeline and you don’t have to bring people in from the outside.
Our big client is Deliveroo. We manage their education perks. They offer all their riders and family members access to education — we manage this across 10 countries with 135,000 riders and their family members. We have a range of courses, from click-and-learn courses like digital skills with OpenClassrooms or languages with Busuu to application-based programmes, personal finance, all different kinds of programmes. It’s positioned as a perk — the programme aligns to Deliveroo’s mission supporting riders as they develop their careers, knowing that that work is often a stepping stone for something else. They want to support that.
Existing tools like big content libraries and an LMS for compliance training don’t solve that. This is about how you skill your people to grow into a new role by investing in their education, especially the kind of people who usually don’t get access. These workers are the ones where you’ll get the most impact for what you invest.
Sylvie Milverton, co-founder, Lynx Educate
Challenges in this space:
- A skills taxonomy is only the first step
- Data alone is not enough
- Improved skills still don’t equate to outcomes
- The alternative credentials ecosystem is large and fragmented
- Overall, adult participation in learning is falling, and it is not distributed evenly
Our predictions for innovation:
Today’s solutions define and untangle skills, while offering skill-informed content and learning pathways → Tomorrow’s solutions will show relationships between skills and roles, while providing facilitated role-aligned career pathways and transitions. What will this look like?
- Meaningfully connecting and unlocking the power of data
- Guided career progression pathways
- Freelance gig marketplaces for for existing employees
- Assessment and accreditation mechanisms will also need to be flexible
Key players
Opportunities for startups:
- Career navigation tools → Problem: When it comes to career choices, we are still in the dark ages. Solution: Use AI to create better predictions of good fit career paths.
- Learning networks and communities → Problem: Masterminds one of the most valuable ways to learn, yet not really scalable. Solution: Tech that enables masterminds/other communities to form and support each other.
- Flight simulator for interpersonal skills → Problem: Practising skills in a high-stakes environment is not the best way to learn because you cannot afford to fail, so in practice it doesn’t happen. Solution: generative AI unlocks flight simulator training for complex interpersonal situations — interactive learning experiences that create safe environments in which to train for high stakes situations or interpersonal skills. This is especially exciting as this moves from chat, to voice, to XR.
- Teaching employees how to use software to enable them to be more productive → Problem: Most SaaS tools are only used in limited way by majority of their users. Solution: Includes teaching AI, no-code skills and how to use sophisticated software.
- Learning materials co-pilots → Problem: Content creation is expensive and takes a lot of time, yet is critical. It’s basically in the job description of L&D professionals. Solution: Until now, machine learning techniques were used to recommend the right pieces of pre-fabricated content to learners. Today, we are starting to use generative AI to create the right piece of content for the learner from scratch based on their needs, radically reducing the cost and improving the effectiveness of learning materials creation.
- AI-powered second brain → Problem: We constantly come across new information and struggle to retain it. Solution: Better capturing and processing of things you read/come across and helping you apply it in your day-to-day. One big feature of this would be AI-powered automated tagging of the things you capture.
- Frontline worker management → Problem: Frontline workers are underserved. Systems to manage them are focused on ERP, not shopfloor. Solution: Shopfloor level management systems that are used by frontline workers 24/7 to track tasks, competencies, development, safety compliance and more, leading to greater productivity, transparency and development opportunities.
- Company-specific LLM for skill assessment → Problem: Tribal knowledge in companies is not systematically collected and organised to power hiring and development. Solution: Connecting all of a company’s performance, goal management and career development data to train a company-specific LLM that can power other applications/use cases like hiring, performance coaching/feedback and career progression.
- Entrepreneurial upskilling → Problem: There is a long tail of entrepreneurs and business owners (often outside tech) that have little to no support with how to run their business. Solution: Resources, programmes and guidance for this demographic.
Read more: Reskilling revolution: tech-enabled talent management for the future of work
Top 10 Future Stars
- There’s been quite a lot of change in this space since last year
- The average age of these companies is just 2 years
SPOTLIGHT ON… QUENCH
Quench.ai facilitates peak performance at work by supercharging training & productivity. We organise and index company content for quick access and searchability, enabling intuitive knowledge retrieval. Our platform increases engagement and retention by offering personalised recommendations based on individual skills and preferences, and AI-driven role-play for practical learning. By integrating expert knowledge into workflows and providing tailored support, Quench.ai is becoming an indispensable tool for daily productivity.
Husayn Kassai, CEO and founder, Quench
Read more: (S)killing it: how workforce development and learning will power our AI future
SPOTLIGHT ON… KINFOLK
The problem we’re solving is that HR teams and managers are tasked with managing the ROI of one of the biggest business investments: salaries. But there’s two problems with that. HR teams can waste up to 2 days per week on repetitive manual tasks, so they can’t focus on strategic human work, such as one of their top problems, which is levelling up managers. Guess what, 84% of managers are ‘accidental’, which means they’re not trained, despite amazing content and courses.
Kinfolk helps in two ways. We automate repetitive manual tasks across the employee lifecycle to free up time, and then we automate the guidance and actions that people teams would want to share with every manager at key moments from onboarding to offboarding, to maximise the freed up time. Think of Kinfolk as a team of people assistants, doing the admin, supporting the right people at the right time without the headcount or any new tool to log in to.
We’ve spoken to hundreds of HR folks and what moves the needle in conversations is: what happens if you don’t do anything? What are you seeing in engagement surveys — how much would it cost if you didn’t solve this and it impacts your business growth goals? Can you afford the time to wait to not do anything? They’ve invested in great content, programmes and tooling — it’s there, but it’s not set up to be delivered in the right way or there isn’t capacity to get the most out of it. For a fraction of the price, you can bring in our AI agents to automate the workflows and guide managers through the process. Effectively what we’re doing is increasing operational efficiency.
Jeet Mukerji, co-founder and CEO, Kinfolk
Challenges in this space:
- HR teams need the right tools and the right data to play a strategic role
- Some demonstrate ROI better than others
- Big legacy players will put up a strong defence
Our predictions for innovation:
- We’ll see the crumbling belief in performance management create an opening
- We’ll see a flow of information that moves in all directions, not just from the top down
- We’ll see workforce analytics continue to morph into business analytics
- We’ll see organisations thinking in much more integrated ways, so that pre-hire assessments flow seamlessly into a single view of an employee’s lifecycle
Key players
Opportunities for startups:
- Employee benefits solutions that reduce the pressure on employees so that they can fulfil their professional potential → Problem: Employees are struggling to juggle pressures across many areas of their lives. Solution: Support with issues such as financial education, elderly care and childcare for employees.
- AI-powered Enterprise knowledge search → Problem: Enterprises have a huge amount of internal knowledge that is hard to tap into and find, adding friction to employees’ day-to-day experiences. Solution: Easier ways to discover and apply information that could either be horizontal or vertical.
- AI-powered second brain → Problem: We constantly come across new information and struggle to retain it. Solution: Better capturing and processing of things you read or come across and helping you to apply it in your day to day. One big feature of this would be AI-powered automated tagging.
- Learning networks and communities of learning → Problem: One of the most valuable ways to learn as part of a culture, yet not really scalable. Solution: Tech that enables masterminds/other communities to form and support each other.
- Company-specific LLM for skill assessment → Problem: Tribal knowledge in companies is not systematically collected and organised to power hiring and development. Solution: Connecting all of a company’s performance, goal management and career development data to train a company-specific LLM that can power other applications/use cases such as hiring, performance coaching, feedback and career progression.
Read on
- Part 1 in this series → How startups can drive innovation in recruitment, career navigation and pre-hire skills assessment
- Part 2 in this series → Edtech for employee engagement: how startups can support onboarding, retention and a strong learning culture
- Part 3 in this series → Can technology and AI support coaching and mentoring at scale?
- Part 4 in this series → (S)killing it: how workforce development and learning will power our AI future
- Part 5 in this series → Reskilling revolution: tech-enabled talent management for the future of work
- We will shortly publish a piece showcasing ‘Ones to Watch’ — very early-stage companies that didn’t quite make the list this year but are working on exciting things!
Read more news, views and research from the only fund backed by the world’s leading education entrepreneurs, in Emerge Edtech Insights.
The full list
When you’re looking at these companies, let’s remember to look at the fundamentals.
We’ve been through the hype before. We’re used to companies grabbing on to an idea, and suddenly everybody has blockchain and .ai in their domain. But if we take a step back, we know that classroom learning is the only way to deliver learning at scale. We also know that learning on your own (MOOCs) is cost-effective but not learner-effective. The promise of AI is to finally provide individualised tuition on that learning journey — at scale.
Large Language Models are ubiquitous. It’s not the language model itself, it’s what the company’s doing on top of that. It’s their pedagogy, it’s the content they’re using, it’s the underlying strength of the company that become most important, not their use of AI.
Don’t forget, you can catch up on the whole discussion on LinkedIn Live, and please let us know if you think we’ve missed any great companies — we will look at all suggestions!
- 5Mins: gamified learning platform designed to help employees improve their skills — UK, 2021, founder: Saurav Chopra.
- Accredible: provides a digital badge and certificate platform — USA, 2013, founders: Alan Heppenstall, Danny King.
- Alva: we’re creating a more fair and data-driven recruitment process — Sweden, 2017, founders: Shahab Sayardoust, Björn Ström.
- Anthropos: private, always-free career profile you can use to review your career steps and experience, autofill job applications using AI, and generate cover letters — Switzerland, 2023, founder: Stefano Bellasio.
- Arist: helps companies deliver learning, training and nudges in the flow of work via Teams, Slack and text message-based courses — USA, 2018, founders: Maxine Anderson, Ryan Laverty, Michael Ioffe.
- BigSpring: the skilling infrastructure for people and communities — USA, 2018, founder: Bhakti Vithalani.
- Bloom: coaching and mentoring that fuels career growth for everyone — UK, 2022, founder: Alistair Crane.
- Colossyan: specialises in AI video for workplace learning, empowering users to generate videos from text through AI technology — USA, 2020, founder: Dominik Kovacs.
- Chance: delivers an augmented coaching by using the technology to multiply the impact of coaching — France, 2015, founders: Ludovic Gromard, Clémence Coghlan.
- DeepHow: AI-powered learning platform for manufacturing, service and repair — USA, 2018, founders: Patrik Matos, Sam Zheng, Wei-Liang Kao.
- Disco: the all-in-one platform for learning communities — Canada, 2020, founders: Candice Faktor, Chris Sukornyk.
- eduMe: mobile-based training platform for the deskless workforce — UK, 2016, founder: Jacob Waern.
- Enboarder: onboarding platform designed to optimise hiring and employee engagement processes — Australia, 2015, founders: Brent Pearson.
- FutureFit AI: helping Fortune 500 companies and governments to build a FutureFit workforce by providing individuals with a “GPS for your Career” — Canada, 2019, founders: Terralynn Forsyth, Hamoon Ekhtiari.
- Hone: effective, engaging and scalable management training to help high-growth companies thrive — USA, 2018, founder: Tom Griffiths.
- InStride: partnering with businesses to create life-changing workforce education programs through a leading academic network — USA, 2019, founder: Jonathan Lau.
- Junto: digital live training for companies — Germany, 2022, founders: Marius Hepp, Johannes Schnell Kretschmer.
- Kinfolk: run playbooks to drive the right employee actions, from hire to retire — UK, 2023, founder: Jeet Mukerji.
- Lepaya: Lepaya upskills the workforces of the world’s leading organisations — Netherlands, 2018, founders: Peter Kuperus, René Janssen.
- Maven: we help professionals to acquire the knowledge they need to become better at their jobs — USA, 2020, founders: Gagan Biyani, Shreyans Bhansali.
- Metaview: AI-powered interviews — UK, 2018, founders: Siadhal Magos, Shahriar Tajbakhsh.
- MobieTrain: the #1 rated learning app for your frontline teams — Belgium, 2015, founders: Guy Van Neck, Willi Van Boven, Mireille van Hemert-Schelling.
- Mursion: provides immersive simulated practice for essential skills in the workplace powered by humans and assisted by AI — USA, 2014, founders: Mark Atkinson, Arjun Nagendran.
- NeoBrain: complete talent and skills management platform using AI and machine learning — France, 2017, founders: Jeremy Jaillant, Paul Courtaud.
- Quench: bringing just-in-time learning to busy professionals — UK, 2023, founder: Husayn Kassai.
- Reelyze: on-demand knowledge platform enables you to provide your people with the information and skills they need to do their jobs whenever and wherever they need it — UK, 2019, founder: Paul Putman.
- Reflex AI: AI tools designed to train, develop and empower frontline teams — USA, 2022, founders: Sam Dorison, John Callery.
- Reforge: Reforge offers selective growth-focused programs for experienced professionals in marketing, product, data and engineering — USA, 2016, founder: Brian Balfour.
- Replicate Labs: drive training adoption with on-demand practice, real-time feedback, and measurable outcomes with AI roleplays — UK, 2023, founder: James Pursey.
- Retrain.ai: a responsible AI-driven talent intelligence platform powering organisations to find, develop, upskill and reskill talent — USA, 2020, founders: Avi Simon, Isabelle Bichler Eliasaf, Shay David.
- Sana: chat, search and interact with all your knowledge — Sweden, 2016, founder: Joel Hellermark.
- Section: Section4 is democratising business education through innovative and engaging 2–3 week sprints — USA, 2018, founder: Scott Galloway.
- Shakers: digital platform intended to facilitate collaboration between freelancers — Spain, 2021, founders: Héctor Mata, Nico de Luis, Adrian de Pedro.
- Sharpist: Sharpist’s mission is to drive the growth of organisations and their people through 1:1 digital coaching and personalised learning journeys — Germany, 2018, founders: Hendrik Schriefer, Fabian Niedballa.
- Sounding Board: coaching management platform intended to help leaders reach their potential — USA, 2016, founders: Christine Tao, Lori Mazan.
- Sparkwise: AI-enabled skill-building platform that radically scales engaging live group learning — USA, 2021, founders: Ari Bader-Natel, Rom Levy, Vince Jeong.
- Strivr: end-to-end immersive learning platform designed to elevate the way people and organisations train, learn and perform — USA, 2015, founder: Derek Belch.
- Test Gorilla: pre-employment test application — Netherlands, 2019, founders: Otto Verhage, Wouter Durville.
- Tech Wolf: workforce planning platform designed to connect people, jobs and education based on skills — Belgium, 2018, founders: Andreas Deneve, Jeroen Van Hautte.
- Workera: enterprise skill assessment and upskilling platform for data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence — USA, 2019, founder: Kian Katanforoosh.
🙏 Thanks
At Emerge, we are on the look-out for companies (existing and new) that will shape the future of workforce development over the coming decade.
If you are a founder building a business addressing any of these challenges in L&D, we want to hear from you. Our mission is to invest in and support these entrepreneurs right from the early stage.
Emerge is a community-powered seed fund home to practical guidance for founders building the future of learning and work. Since 2014, we have invested in more than 80 companies in the space, including Colossyan, FutureFit AI and SkillsTrust.
If you are looking for your first cheque funding, do apply to us here. We look at everything because we believe in democratising access to funding (just as much as we believe in democratising access to education and skills).
Emerge Education welcomes inquiries from new investors and founders. For more information, visit emerge.education or email hello@emerge.education, and sign up for our newsletter here.
Thank you for reading… I would hugely appreciate some claps 👏 and shares 🙌 so that others can find it!
Nic
