AcademyOcean has been selected to receive funding from the Google for Startups Ukraine Support Fund
In March 2022, Google announced the $5 million Google for Startups Ukraine Support Fund. Throughout 2022, recipient startups receive up to $100,000 of equity-free financial investment, as well as Google Cloud credits and hands-on Google product and technical support.
The first batch of 17 recipients was announced in May, and recently 16 more startups were selected to join, including AcademyOcean from Netpeak Group .
What is AcademyOcean? How did it start?
AcademyOcean is a smart learning management system that was created in 2017 in Odesa, Ukraine.
The lighthouse is AcademyOcean's symbol and logo (file photo)
“The idea of AcademyOcean came up when I was building another product,” the founder of AcademyOcean Volodymyr Polo said to AIN.Capital. “We needed a tool that would help onboard our customers and train our employees. We did our research, but we could not find any tool on the market that met our exact needs, so we decided to build our own Academy.”?
After that, the company's clients and partners started to ask if they could have the same learning tool for their needs. Rising demand for a platform for building online academies encouraged the team to create an online platform, but the product wasn’t launched in the usual way.
First,? the team's designer made just layouts of Volodymyr Polo’s perfect LMS. “We named the product AcademyOcean, though there was no such product yet,” Polo explained. “We went through the potential US clients on LinkedIn to find out if there was neediness for such a product. What was a big surprise for me — people around the world were interested in the platform. Moreover, they were willing to pay. So I realized that it is necessary to create AcademyOcean.”
How does it work now?
Instead of boring manuals, here are a few short stories about AcademyOcean’s clients and partners.
A French company came up with the idea of training their employees who are retiring. The task was to help them adapt to a new stage of life, and it was necessary to consider their gender, interests, and location. AcademyOcean developed a unique LMS technology for this purpose, so the contents of the Academy could be personalized on the basis of a particular learner’s characteristics. Thus a retiree in Lyon and a retiree in Marseille saw different versions of the same course. They also were impressed by how simply and clearly AcademyOcean works.?
By the way, AcademyOcean has an industry-leading ease-of-use rating of 9.8 out of 10 on G2.
?Another example is Netpeak Group. Our HR & Recruitment team was spending 320 hours monthly to onboard about 20 people. After we launched an internal Netpeak Group Academy, time spent on onboarding decreased by 60%.
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YouScan reached out to AcademyOcean in 2019. YouScan’s clients requested educational courses to train their employees in using YouScan’s products and to test and consolidate the acquired knowledge about social media analytics. So YouScan created the Academy for clients to study independently at any time convenient to them.?
AcademyOcean’s growth path
Before the war, AcademyOcean had x3 year-over-year growth during 2020 and 2021.?
Starting as a small team of four talented people, today they have 20 professionals working on the product.
There are more than 300,000 learners on the platform, but all business processes are organized neatly and safely. The team now is located in 7 countries and speaks different languages, so all the clients can receive qualified service.
AcademyOcean's team in Odesa (file photo)
How is the team going to spend received funding from Google?
“The Ukrainian IT industry impressed the world even before the war, and now we are working to support Ukraine’s economy in difficult times, so our motivation is twice as big,”?— Volodymyr Polo, Founder & CEO at AcademyOcean.
First of all, AcademyOcean is investing in team expansion and along with this, they are going to increase their presence worldwide.
New technologies are rapidly developing, and the possibility of fast and high-quality learning is very important. Therefore, AcademyOcean’s mission is to develop technology for personalized, evidence-based learning and development.
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