Sarah Sedgman, CEO of Ottawa-based LearnExperts, bootstrapped for the first few years. But when early adopters showed interest, she knew she’d need outside investment.
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On a Monday in mid-February, Sarah Sedgman sent a note to her company’s investors to announce the kickoff of her latest fundraising round. The CEO of Ottawa-based LearnExperts, which makes a learning content creation tool that allows customers to generate knowledge-sharing and training programs more quickly and easily, reached out, as she typically does, to keep her key supporters in the loop.
In her message, she attached a link to a Google sheet filled with the names of investors she hoped to connect with. Her note also included a specific request.
“I asked angels to put their name next to anyone on the list they would be willing to introduce me to,” Sedgman says. “Within two days, it was nearly filled with angels offering to help me take this next step.”
As a former course developer and chief knowledge officer, Sedgman has plenty of experience with the slow, outdated way in which training content and materials have always been created. This knowledge and understanding of the pain points gave her confidence to leave the corporate world (she held executive positions at Cognos and Kinaxis, among others) to start LearnExperts in 2019.
Using artificial and human intelligence, the company’s product, LEAi, lets customers create and reuse content for traditional instructor-led training, as well as e-learning, micro-learning, presentations, webinars, videos, job aids and e-pub. Users upload presentations, web pages, documents and/or raw video content, LEAi applies a learning framework and writes the course content following best practices leveraging AI, and then it exports learning content in a variety of formats.
With LEAi, educational courses and programs in a myriad of industries are now being developed more cost-effectively and quickly. Where building just one hour of course material the old-fashioned way could take up to 250 hours of development, LEAi does it more than three times faster.
“As we grow, we anticipate we’ll be in any industry that needs educational content; knowledge creates opportunity,” Sedgman says. “No other tech company has been able to solve this problem. Using AI to take raw content from subject matter experts and turning it into learning and knowledge-sharing is a unique approach that hasn’t been done, and our customers agree.”
So do LearnExperts’ angel investors. Sedgman bootstrapped the company for the first few years, but by the time it had interest from early adopters such as Ceridian and OpenText, she knew she’d need outside investment to keep up with market demand.
“We thought if customers were willing to pay for this, it was time to start fundraising to accelerate product development and, over time, accelerate the company,” she says.
In early 2021, Sedgman joined Invest Ottawa’s pre-accelerator program (now called Ignition) and was paired with Julia Elvidge, a tech executive and angel investor who was volunteering her time mentoring founders.
“We’d meet once a week so I could ask questions and she was vital to putting together my pitch. She’s continued to be a trusted adviser and sounding board since,” Sedgman says.
When it was time to fundraise in March 2021, Elvidge connected Sedgman with the Ottawa-based angel group Capital Angel Network (CAN). Sedgman was exceptionally successful there, with 22 angels participating in due diligence and 15 investing; it was the largest investment in terms of number of angels in CAN’s history.
Afterward, Elvidge joined Sedgman at pitch meetings with other angel groups across the province to inspire confidence in LearnExperts.
“She told them she believed in me and in what I was doing,” Sedgman recalls. “I don’t think we would’ve raised our first $1.25 million without her. She really gave me a lot of her time and guidance.”
Mentorship comes naturally to Elvidge, the former president and co-founder of Chipworks, a semiconductor and IP consulting firm. She joined Invest Ottawa to help entrepreneurs and her interest in working with founders led her to join CAN and become a founding volunteer with SheBoot, an investment-readiness program that prepares women founders to pitch their innovations and secure funding.
Elvidge’s relationship with LearnExperts is unique. While she’s made more than 20 investments in her years as an angel, she’s worked most closely with Sedgman.
“I thought Sarah was special,” says Elvidge. “She lived the pain of the customers she wanted to serve, she was ravenous for information, she was coachable, and I liked her maturity and her years of experience leading teams. She showed passion and resilience; these qualities made her a slam dunk.
“I was familiar with how hard it was to create learning material,” Elvidge continues. “Most people aren’t skilled in how to teach others and I loved Sarah’s idea of taking material from subject matter experts, rearranging and curating it.”
The fact that LearnExperts is a female-led company was also meaningful to Elvidge. When she started angel investing, she says she didn’t expect female angels to be so outnumbered by their male counterparts. It also didn’t take her long to realize she wasn’t seeing as many women founders as she’d anticipated. To help more women realize their dreams, she commits two-thirds of her angel investments to female-led businesses and often speaks on panels about the role women investors can play in the ecosystem.
“Education is necessary for most women angels. Many have access to the dollars they need to invest, but we don’t talk about their role enough and it can be daunting for them,” she says. “Women founders are struggling to get off the ground and women investors really play a part in their success.”
With the generative AI market poised to keep expanding — some studies show it could hit more than $118 billion in less than a decade — LearnExperts is perfectly positioned to continue its growth trajectory. Just last year, the company grew revenues by more than 400 per cent and customers increased by more than 500 per cent.
As Sedgman moves into her next stage of fundraising, she’s clear about the ways angels have helped her get to this point, and it isn’t all about the cheques they’ve written.
“I send our angel investors monthly updates so they know what we’re working on and I always have asks when I reach out. Angels come from various backgrounds, have different skill sets and big networks. These are people who’ve typically made it already, they either know business and what you’re going through as an entrepreneur, or they have connections who can help. I’m not afraid to lean on them,” she says. “I’ve found they’re very accessible and engaged and we wouldn’t be seen as a leader in the content authoring space without them.”
