AcademyAI, a workplace AI skills assessment and training startup, has raised £1.65 million in an oversubscribed pre-seed round from Nexus Family Office and Panthera Family Office.
Most companies have given employees access to tools like ChatGPT or Copilot, but few know whether their people can use them well. AcademyAI assesses employees against a six-axis AI capability framework, built with the Alan Turing Institute Methodology, identifying gaps in critical thinking, judgment, prompting, evaluating outputs and building skills. Personalised micro-learning and practical use cases then follow, built around each person's real role. Training is delivered in 5-minute applied modules rather than hour-long webinars, role-specific and rooted in an organisation's context, tools and language. Because the platform is powered by underlying AI models and the content is AI generated, the training stays up to date. For leadership, dashboards track capability growth across individuals, teams and departments.
The gap AcademyAI is targeting is a recognised one: 55% of AI decision makers say investment outpaces readiness. Co-founder Andy Lambert previously founded ContentCal, which was later acquired by Adobe for over $100m. Fellow co-founders Michael Walton and Rob Barnett both invested in ContentCal.
We closed this round oversubscribed, which tells us investors see the same gap we do. Every company and CEO we talk to has given their teams access to AI tools. Almost none of them know if their people can use them properly. It's a measurement problem first: leaders don't know what their teams are capable of, so they can't close the distance between buying a tool and getting value from it. Closing the gap between AI adoption and AI outcomes is what we built AcademyAI to do.
