2024
AI maturity
Generative models crossed the threshold where authoring becomes a co-author, not a toy.
Stanford AI Index 2024 →
What if AI didn't replace your experts —
but turned every one of them into a teacher?
Cogniate. Brilliance — in minutes.
Teach something new
Five inflection points converged in 2024.
2025
Skills cliff
59% of the global workforce needs retraining by 2030 — a generational re-skill.
WEF Future of Jobs 2025 →2024
Training transfer crisis
Less than 12% of corporate training transfers to on-the-job behaviour.
ATD State of the Industry →2025
AI valuation premium
Carta data: AI-native SaaS commands 3–5× the multiple of legacy SaaS at Series A.
Carta State of Private Markets →2025
Creator economy momentum
Subject-matter experts now monetise directly — the market for authoring tools is consumer-scale.
Goldman Sachs Creator Economy →
Name the problem
The maths no longer works.
$0B
spent globally on training every year
<0%
of training transfers to the job
9–16
disconnected tools to ship one course (9–16)
49–267
hours to produce one hour of eLearning (49–267)
$15K–$30K
per finished hour of content ($15K–$30K)
0%
of the workforce needs retraining by 2030
The bottleneck isn't AI. It's relevance.
$400B global spend
Training Industry 2025 — Corporate L&D up 6.9% YoY.
12% transfer
ATD State of the Industry — knowledge → behaviour conversion.
49–267 hrs / hr
Chapman Alliance — production benchmark, instructional design weight class.
The perfect world
Free your knowledge in minutes.
Stage 1
Prompt
You bring expertise & context
Stage 2
Co-author
Lyra structures for your learners
Stage 3
Publish
You publish with OmniPublish
All in one workflow. Done in minutes.
Learning Science
Bloom + Kirkpatrick + spaced retrieval baked into the structure layer.
Knowledge Pools
Your SME content, sources, brand voice — held privately, reused across courses.
Enterprise Requirements
SSO, audit trail, version control, role-based access from day one.
Compliance
SCORM / xAPI / cmi5. WCAG 2.2 AA. PII handling per jurisdiction.
Tailored solution
Turning a cost-centre into a revenue asset.
Prompt
Scope
Design
Outline
Style
Publish
Under 60 minutes per course.
Before
L&D is a cost line
9–16 disconnected tools, weeks of production, no compounding asset.
After
L&D is a revenue engine
One engine, five revenue surfaces. Subscription, white-label, product academies, compliance, creator economy.
⇆
The same firms that used to spend money on training now sell it.
Employee Retention
Up-skill at scale. Lower attrition. CFO-grade ROI.
Customer Academies
Educate buyers → expansion + reduced support.
Professional Services
Productise expertise. Sell training, not hours.
Compliance Updates
Regulatory delta, auto-republished. Quarterly cadence.
White-Label Channel
Partners ship Cogniate as their academy.
How Cogniate works
Watch it author a course in minutes.
A two-minute walkthrough: prompt to publish, with Lyra in the loop.
Proof
Traction before launch.
$0K
Signed enterprise LOIs — before we launch.
0
EOIs
0%
conversion since beta
0
customers also investing as angels
TTROAR DataExceliumKPMGTTROAR DataExceliumKPMGTTROAR DataExceliumKPMG
“This is the only platform that respects how adults actually learn.”
Thomas Frey · Senior Futurist
“Compresses 6 weeks of authoring into an afternoon.”
Melissa Perry · Product Coach
“A serious enterprise tool dressed in a creator-friendly UX.”
Kirsty Chadwick · TTRO Founder
“Our compliance team signed off in one review.”
Alessandro Marianantoni · L&D Director
The prize
One platform. Nine ICPs. A trillion-dollar market.
TAM
SAM
$0M
SOM 2032TAM$1.14T
Global addressable knowledge mobilisation market.
SAM$115B
Reachable across our 9 ICPs in T+5y.
SOM (2032)$200M
Conservative ceiling at 0.17% of SAM.
Even at our 2032 ceiling we hold less than 0.2% of SAM. The headroom is the moat.
| ICP | TAM |
|---|---|
| Corporate L&D | $391B |
| Product Training | $200B |
| Higher Education | $220B |
| K-12 | $80B |
| Homeschool | $40B |
| Heads of Department | $40B |
| Creators | $40B |
| Individual SMEs | $80B |
| L&D Channel | $50B |
| Total TAM | $1.14T |
Unit economics
Predictable. Compounding.
Creator
10 courses
A$39 / mo
Pro Creator
30 courses
A$79 / mo
Team
50 courses pooled
A$99 / seat / mo
Enterprise + Website
Unlimited, white-label
A$25K – A$150K / yr
0:1
LTV:CAC ratio
A$0
Blended CAC
0.0 mo
Payback period
0%
Gross margin
Y1
$1.25M ARR
Foundation: 2,500 paying customers.
Y2
$7.9M ARR
Channel + enterprise wedge engaged.
Y3
$20M ARR
Multi-ICP coverage, white-label scale.
CFO note: model anchored to 60% B2C creator / 25% B2B SMB / 15% B2B Enterprise mix. Conservative blended CAC.
Team
We're not solving this alone.
Morné Maritz
Founder & Chief Architect
M.Com (Org Psych), MBA · Co-architected EY Skills Foundry ($500M).
Celena Magnussen
Chief Customer Architect
Built Sendspark; B2B GTM operator.
Lydia Carlson
Chief of Staff
Scaled SaaS to 300 B2B accounts in 5 months.
PT Directors
Laura Makaltses
Yanua Deng
Amna Romnic
Fractional
Kathryn Vatt
IP
Johnny Le
CTO
Jean-Baptiste Isnard
AI
Kim Stewart-Smith
CFO
Advisors
Braden Dickson
Ex EY Chair Oceania
Roman Quaedvlieg
Ex ABF Commissioner
Kirsty Chadwick
Global SME · CEO of TTRO
Jason Butcher
Serial Tech Entrepreneur
Dr Thomas Frey
Global expert · AI, Tech & Education
Morné's EY Skills Foundry experience — a $500M global re-skilling programme — is the direct precedent for Cogniate. We've already built and scaled the system inside a Big Four. Now we're shipping it as a product so every enterprise can run their own.
The ask
Two-stage raise.
1
Stage 1 · Bridge Seed
Closing Q3 2026
US$500K
SAFE at US$10M cap · A$800K total incl. ESIC and Sydecar SPV
Launch · 2,500 paying customers in Y1.
2
Stage 2 · Series A
May 2027
US$15M
US$60M pre-money · 17% dilution
Anchored by US$3M ARR at that point.
Use of funds
100%
- Product48%
- Team30%
- Activation10%
- Opps8%
- Reserve4%
SAFE structure with cap, no discount, MFN. Pro-rata for institutional checks ≥ US$100K. ESIC-eligible for Australian investors (43.5% refundable R&D rebate stack on top). Full cap table on request under NDA.
Creativity is life. Kindness is king.
AI changed how we write software. AI changed how we make media.
The next transformation is how organisations learn.
Companies already have the expertise.
Educate your people. Don't replace them.
May the course be with you.
FAQ
What investors are asking.
“EdTech is dead. Investors lost their shirts. Why are you any different?”
We're not EdTech. The companies that crashed (Coursera, 2U, Chegg, Pearson) all played in the same five sub-categories — LMS, course marketplace, video learning, language learning, tutoring. Same buyers (consumers + universities), same unit economics. They were re-priced at 1–3× ARR because the model never worked at scale.
We sit in a different category — Knowledge Mobilisation — enabling tech, not content delivery. Our buyers are L&D leaders, Heads of Department, product training teams, and SMEs. Their budgets are still growing (Corporate L&D up 6.9% in 2024 per Training Industry), not consumer wallets contracting. We're not the next Coursera. We're the picks-and-shovels for the upskilling decade.
Sources: Training Industry 2025 · HolonIQ EdTech Map 2024 · NYT — 2U bankruptcy July 2024
“EdTech is saturated. 20,000+ companies. What space is empty?”
Saturated — for EdTech. We don't play there. Cogniate sits in the white space between Future-of-Work tech (Notion, Loom) and Enabling Tech (Canva, Figma). Our buyers create training; they don't consume it.
- Pace mismatch. Education updates on 5–7 year cycles. Business needs change in 90 days. 20× gap.
- Creativity collapse. Ken Robinson's TED talk diagnosed it — we bring creative variability back through AI-augmented authoring.
- Access argument. Knowledge Mobilisation treats education as an essential service — deployable across languages, devices, economic strata.
Sources: Ken Robinson TED 2006 · WEF Future of Jobs 2025 · UNESCO GEM Report 2024
“What's your actual moat? Patents in AI are notoriously weak.”
Patents are one layer, not the whole moat. Stacked defensibility:
- Workflow patents — $16.4M filed patent value (Vatt IP). Portfolio-grade leverage, not single-claim defence.
- Data moat — every course generates structural pedagogical signal. After 100K courses, foundation models can't replicate without our usage data.
- Channel moat — TTRO, LinkedIn Learning, Moodle and a growing network of publishing partners. Inside a 20K-member community, switching takes months.
- Switching cost moat — 50+ courses in SCORM packages with compliance audit trails = migration in millions and quarters.
Sources: IFI Claims patent rankings · Bessemer 10 Laws of Cloud · Andrew Chen — Cold Start Problem