Founders of Co-rise - Julia Stiglitz, Sourabh Bajaj, and Jacob Samuelson (former Coursera employees - have raised a seed fund of $8.5m from Greylock and Deborah Quazzo at GSV, Greg Brockman, co-founder Open AI, and Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder DeepMind.
What it is
CoRise is an AI-powered online education platform They’ve rethought the experience with a ground-up focus on professional outcomes.
Working with learners from 500+ leading companies over the past year, their approach is showing 10X better than online content-first learning options. To date, 78% of Co-Rise learners have completed their courses.
The market
CoRise is for everyone who is already working.
The wicked problem
If you don’t know that there is a worldwide skill shortage for data engineering and analytics, machine learning, DevOps, and cybersecurity - you have been sleeping under a rock!!
Why people quit - the great resignation
According to a July 2022 McKinsey study, “lack of career advancement” opportunities is now the number one driver of the “Great Resignation,”
Strategic workforce upskilling has become not only a prerequisite for an employees growth - but of an organisations growth - and a key part of diversity and retention strategy as well.
The skills most demanded by businesses, and thus most richly rewarded, are changing ever-faster.
Our existing educational models such as Universities cannot keep up - the future needs to be a blended Vocational mode
At a time when university “teaching capacity” limit the amount of talent flowing into the tech and AI workforce,” we need more innovation.
Course completions are at 3-6% and are inapplicable to real-world work.
How do you fix this?
- How do you upskill and reskill?
- How do you transform your workforce ?
- How do you transform analysts into data scientists, engineers into machine learning experts.
- How do you transform traditional infrastructure operations managers into devops engineers?
- How can you serve the massive professional education market, and their even bigger is mission?
- How can you balance motivation and behavior change and offer courses that people want to complete at an accessible price point in a scalable format?
- How can you get outcomes or results for learners at scale?
- How can you have lots of people in a cohort and still have a great experience with customer led training?
- How can you give an all access pass to a student for $1000?
- How can you get students to complete assignments with a “nudging infrastructure” or gamification like duolingo?
- How can you scale personalised learning?
- How can you maintain that personalised element ?
- Can you offer expert-led programming that divides people up into small groups to nurture collaboration and the exchange of ideas - at scale?
- Can you have standardized courses with bigger classes is the only way to get programming to “be really accessible”?
- How can you make the price point manageable?“Single course access costs an average of $400, and students can buy an all-access pass to every cohort for around $1,000.” For comparison, a single course on Maven – perhaps this one on founder finance – can cost $2,000
The ingredients
- World-class instructors from cutting-edge organizations teach cohort-based courses organized around practical projects and designed for working professionals
- Communities of practice for social learning and support - where you can collaborate learn and grow together
- Use of automation and AI to deliver personalization, quality, and outcomes at scale
Competitors
Udemy, Udacity, Guild Education and, well, her her former employer.
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Could this be the magic sauce ?
CoRise is selling to enterprises in need of more tailored solutions for their talent. In talking to learning and development leaders, the founder learned that organizations are either rolling out asynchronous education platforms to the entire staff, or bringing in consultants to do customer training; “there sort of wasn’t anything in between,” she said, so she built it.
Stiglitz doesn’t want CoRise to scale to a place where it hosts 20,000 courses taught by thousands of instructors. Instead, the startup wants to offer one applied machine learning course that teaches 1,000 or 5,000 students at a time.
“We’re targeting large companies who want to roll out SQL training to 1,000 people, but they’re not going to want to roll out eight different versions of that class. That’s how we get scale.”
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