Our investment in Pixaera

Ask anyone who has grown up playing video games what their most profound memories are and certain game moments will likely make the cut. For me:

• Driving into Liberty City for the first time in Grand Theft Auto 3
• Playing out The Battle of Normandy in Call of Duty 2
• Riding into Mexico in Read Dead Redemption
• Exiting Vault 101 in Fallout 3

These moments largely defined my childhood. They immersed me to such an extent, that I vividly remember them to this day, as though I have just experienced them. Liberty City may be a fictional city, the Battle of Normandy may have taken place decades ago… but it sure feels like I have been to both. This is precisely what makes games so powerful — they teleport you. They make the unreal feel real.

When designed well, games are undeniably one of the most effective mediums for storytelling. They enable the player to actively partake in the narrative, and by doing so, retain so much of the experience… namely the emotions felt and the lessons learnt.

At their core, games are also incredibly well suited for teaching. Game designers have to ensure that players learn a game’s mechanics at the right pace in order to limit player frustration and churn. If a game is too hard, too soon, players will hit a wall and leave. If a game is too easy and does not get progressively more challenging, players will get bored. In many ways, this is no different to traditional education. You are unlikely to enjoy jumping into Calculus before tackling Algebra. The bottom line is that designing balanced progression experiences is mission critical to unlocking player engagement. This is a universal truth in the industry — one that is widespread and very well understood.

Tying the above together, it is hard not to see gaming as a deeply powerful medium for education. The immersiveness of play translates to high knowledge retention, while balanced progression mechanics mean high learner engagement. And yet, it feels to us as though the video game industry has largely neglected the education use case. Incumbent players are almost exclusively focused on entertainment… perhaps unsurprisingly though, given things seem to be going pretty well. In 2021, the games industry generated well over $200bn in sales, with recent forecasts indicating that the figure will most certainly surpass $300bn by 2026.

At LocalGlobe, however, we have long believed that gaming will extend far beyond entertainment and increasingly intersect with a growing list of verticals, from finance and fitness to social and yes, also education. This is not a particularly new view for us and dates back to our investments in Robinhood and Codecademy, both of which revolutionised their respective fields through gamification. Years since we made those investments, the opportunity feels more immediate than ever. Graphics have become life-like, while the cost of developing high-end, interactive experiences has fallen significantly thanks to game engines such as Unity and Unreal. One has to ask: why gamify an experience, when you can now build a full out AAA game around it? To us, this is where the world is heading.

The university cases studies of the near future will be experienced through simulations, not taught via text or lectures, while corporate training will be played out by workers, not learnt via antiquated videos. Games will undoubtedly democratise procedural learning. People will play for fun but they will also play to learn. Game studios will start serving enterprise customers, not just end-consumers. We will all learn by doing.

This is where Pixaera comes in, a company on a mission to make this very vision a reality. To put it simply, Pixaera is a game platform for the professional world, built on the premise that the future of corporate training should be engaging, empowering and fun. The company believes that immersive learning is the answer and should be the go-to way people learn most new skills.

For context, research indicates that immersive learning vastly outperforms traditional teaching methods by an order of magnitude. Average knowledge retention in a classroom after a week is 20%. Meanwhile, knowledge retention via experiential learning is 70–90%. Unfortunately though, scaling experiential teaching is incredibly hard today. Real-life training requires equipment, supervision, often large physical spaces and the need to travel. It is simply too expensive to deploy. Pixaera removes those barriers altogether, delivering high quality, cross-platform training experiences, at scale through play. It is a AAA gaming platform designed for enterprises, not a training product wrapped inside a game engine. Watch below to see what we mean:

And while it is clear to us that Pixaera’s products will be needed across industries and corporate functions, the business is laser focused on solving a very immediate use case today — health and safety training. To shed some light on the magnitude of the problem, the world sees over 370m occupational accidents every year, 2.78m of which result in deaths. The byproduct of these accidents is a 4% hit to the world’s annual GDP, roughly $3.2 trillion in losses. By replacing antiquated training methods with high-end, immersive experiences, Pixaera has the potential to A) massively reduce workplace accidents, and thereby, save lives and B) prevent tens, if not hundreds of billions worth of unnecessary damages.

What underpins the company’s motive to start off by tackling health and safety training comes directly from its founder’s past. Mousa, who is a life-long gamer, previously led the supply chain team for one of BP’s major rig operations in the Northern part of Iraq. It was there where he witnessed a work-related death for the first time, one that could have unfortunately been prevented given proper training. The accident meant a life gone and millions in losses due to halted production. Sadly, this is not a one-off for the industry.

As such, it comes as no surprise that Pixaera’s first major customers include a roster of oil & gas multinationals, from BP and Shell to General Electric and FieldCore. Given the regulatory nature of the industry, worker safety training has to be conducted annually. This means that recurring usage is baked in via the law and for good reason. It is deeply important. And for an industry that sits at the very top of the ‘highest polluting’ list, immersive training also means reduced reliance on travel for worker training. That is a win-win.

Longer term, we see Pixaera extending its tentacles everywhere… from manufacturing, construction and inspection training to leadership and mental health. You name it. And while the business currently develops content in-house, on behalf of customers, albeit very quickly, it is on a mission to build out its own development platform — one not too dissimilar to a Roblox Studio. This will enable any organisation, topic expert or third-party services provider to easily design, deploy and monetise their own highly unique immersive training experience. It is fair to say, this is a future we are pretty damn excited about.

Today, we are thrilled to announce that we are partnering with Mousa and the entire Pixaera team to deliver on this vision. We are deeply excited to be leading the company’s Seed round alongside existing investors York IE, the founders of FACEIT and renewable energy co ERM.

- Ziv and Team LG