81. Learnerbly

Founder: Rajeeb Dey
Founded: September 2016
Website: learnerbly.com

Where do you go if you want to find a coach or great sales course for yourself as a start-up founder, or for your senior leadership team?

This was the question award-winning entrepreneur Rajeeb Dey was faced with when he wanted to invest in his, and his employees, development but realised he didn’t know where to go or what courses would be best to spend out on.

As creator of jobs platform Enternships – which has helped over 7,000 companies hire interns and graduates – Dey was also noticing how the companies he worked with wanted to develop their own people but were allocating personal learning budgets “with no idea of how effective that investment was”.

Inspired, and with data estimating that by 2025 half of the jobs we see today won’t exist, Dey realised the need for continuous learning. And he sought about looking for ways to create a shortcut to help people find learning content that they could trust, without having to spend hours researching.

This lightbulb moment has culminated in Learnerbly, the workplace platform which curates trusted content from experts and entrepreneurs such as Baroness Martha Lane Fox, and Unilever chief HR officer Leena Nair, alongside recommendations for the best conferences, coaches, and classes.

Backed by £1.6m seed funding from the likes of Frontline Ventures and Playfair Capital, and angel investors such as Eventbrite co-founder Renaud Visage, London-based Learnerbly has grown quickly in the 18 months since launch.

Its roster of clients includes IDEO, GoCardless, Duedil, carwow and ustwo, while the start-up has won accolades at the Duke of York’s esteemed Pitch at Palace competition and was named by EU-Startups as one of 10 new businesses set to disrupt the education industry.

With a goal to become the global destination for professional development, the next 12 months will see the start-up expand its offer internationally and scale up its partnership function.