Obrizum Group Ltd., a startup focused on helping organizations improve their employee training programs, on Thursday announced that it has closed a $11.5 million funding round.

The Series A round was led by Guinness Ventures with contributions from new investor Celeres Ventures and several existing backers. According to Obrizum, it has raised a total of $17 million from investors since launching in 2015. 

U.K.-based Obrizum provides a software platform that promises to reduce the amount of time and effort involved in create employee training content. The platform can ingest a company’s existing training materials, as well as related resources such as business documents. Built-in artificial intelligence algorithms then automatically assemble the materials into courses that Obrizum dubs Knowledge Spaces.

The platform can also customize courses for every user, according to Obrizum. The startup says its platform’s automated customization capability increases the effectiveness of organizations’ employee training content.  

Courses that companies create with Obrizum’s platform include a set of questions about the topic at hand. Users are asked to not only answer the questions but also specify their confidence in each answer. Based on the information submitted by a user, the platform can determine what learning content should be displayed in the next section of a course to optimize the employee training experience.

Executives can evaluate the effectiveness of their company’s training initiatives through a built-in analytics tool. According to Obrizum, the tool also helps with other tasks. It can analyze data from enterprise training initiatives to find workforce knowledge gaps that may require a company to expand its library of learning content. 

“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,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Chibeza Agley. “We have since been proven right in our predictions that automation would be crucial, time would be at a premium, personalization would be a requirement rather than a luxury and data would be the most precious of all commodities.”

Obrizum has reportedly grown its revenues by a factor of 17 since the end of 2020. The startup didn’t disclose absolute revenue numbers, but detailed that it has about 20 enterprise customers. Merck & Co., the University of Cambridge and Barclays PL are among the organizations that use its platform.

The company will use the proceeds from its latest funding round to expand its platform’s automation capabilities. It also plans to add other capabilities, including new integrations with third-party software products. 

“Obrizum’s adaptive learning technology not only cuts training times for large enterprises but ensures better learning outcomes,” said Shane Gallwey, the head of ventures at Guinness Ventures. “The return on investment for enterprises who use their technology is startling and explains the take-up of Obrizum by household names.”

Image: Obrizum