A New Chapter for NovoEd: What this Acquisition Means to Us

I could not be more excited to share that NovoEd has reached a new milestone in its company’s history. We have been acquired by Boston-based private equity group Devonshire Investors. In Devonshire, we have found a financial partner who shares our passion for collaborative learning and our commitment to the corporate learning and development market. The resources provided by Devonshire will allow us to accelerate our momentum in product functionality, customer support, and market reach. NovoEd’s customers will be the biggest beneficiaries of this infusion of resources and we are excited about the next chapter!

We are now in a strengthened position to deliver on the vision initially articulated by our co-founders Amin Saberi and Farnaz Ronaghi, who started NovoEd in 2013 at Stanford’s Social Algorithms Lab. Amin and Farnaz, our Chief Technology Officer, knew that true learning isn’t an isolated activity but happens experientially and collaboratively and developed the NovoEd platform based on this insight.

I’m so proud of our team. I joined NovoEd in 2016 because of my strong belief in NovoEd’s mission – providing a social, engaging, and effective learning experience that empowers individuals and organizations. Over the past few years, we have seen demand grow for active, engaging learning experiences that are collaborative, project-based, and mentor-supported – and available online. Our customers are looking for ways to not only scale their training reach across a global workforce with greater quality and impact but to dramatically save on training costs as well.

Most of the executives I speak with are expecting more from their employees in areas such as leadership, innovation, design thinking, risk-taking, customer service, and sales. These types of skills are still predominantly taught offline or in a classroom because they require collaboration and discussion. Our customers are turning to NovoEd to build these critical skills across a distributed and diverse employee base with an engaging, cost-effective learning experience that facilitates networking and connection.

As corporate training expenditures surpass $100 billion and workforces become more distributed, companies need to apply even more scrutiny to their training dollars while expanding their employee reach. With the average cost of an in-person three-day workshop at around $4,500, our customers are looking for alternatives that can deliver a similar experience that can be cost-effectively rolled out at scale with consistent high quality. As a result, we see demand for NovoEd’s online collaborative learning delivery platform continue to grow.

Now, with Devonshire, we are even better equipped to meet this market opportunity. We look forward to partnering with our customers as we continue on this journey to meet their training needs today and tomorrow.

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