Accelerating time to skill - Arnaud Blachon (Rise Up)

EdTech Founders

In this episode: Frank Albert Coates is talking with Arnaud Blachon who is the co-founder and CEO of Rise Up, a specialist provider of learning software solutions that help organisations stay up-to-skill. With an engineering background he began his career as an application developer and in 2014, he co-founded Rise Up with his brother Guillaume, aiming to revolutionize corporate learning through blended learning solutions at the time.

They have now raised nearly 50M EUR in funding and have more than 130 employees, support 5 million learners and 500+ clients. This year they are jumping on the adaptive learning bandwagon with the acquisition of the adaptive learning platform Domoscio that will allow personalized learning at scale.

We talk about:

Overcoming initial market misunderstandings, strategies for expanding across Europe, learning personalization at scale through adaptive learning and AI, market consolidation, how to succeed in a market with a focus on doing more with less

….and lots more.

Outtakes:

• The difference between Rise Up and the rest of the world is; we want to accelerate what we call the time to skill. On average, if you look at the last Gartner research and Josh Bersin as well, even if we are all convinced that training is key, people spend less than 25 minutes on formal learning every week.
• After COVID it also moved from an HR decision to a general management topic, which completely changed the game in terms of how to unlock budget, basically. Companies were convinced that investing in digital was key. It accelerated, and I think not only in the HR space, but the whole digital transformation of every department.
• Having the right skills framework is important because it first it will permit to really align learning objectives with business objectives.
• Pure players, if they are not delivering enough wide functionality, can't survive right now.

The ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠EdTech Garage⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ is a community for early-stage European EdTech startups where founders can scale up faster through the founder community, matchmaking and specialized resources. In this podcast series we interview startup founders & players supporting early-stage EdTech startups from across Europe. We get straight to the point in 20+ minutes and publish new episodes roughly every month.

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Host: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Frank Albert Coates⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Music: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ehsansation