From left to right: Andrew Ng, Kian Katanforoosh, CEO of Workera, and James Lee, COO of Workera

Workera today announced $5 million in seed funding led by Owl Ventures and AI Fund, with participation from Plug and Play Ventures.

The company is founded by Kian Katanforoosh, Stanford Computer Science lecturer who has taught AI to over a million people and James Lee, former VP of Global Operations at Udacity, and its chairman of the board is Dr. Andrew Ng, co-founder of Coursera.

Founded in 2019, Workera is a skills transformation platform for enterprises and individuals. For enterprises, Workera enables companies to unlock their full potential in data science, machine learning and other AI technologies, and to ensure data-AI literacy across their entire organization. For students and professionals, Workera enables them to measure their data-AI skills, benchmark themselves against the best-in-class, and to unlock their potential with a personalized, progressive learning plan.

Workera provides an end-to-end solution to enterprises and charges on a per-employee annual subscription basis. It has worked with dozens of companies and has assessed tens of thousands of individuals.

One of the greatest challenges enterprises face in developing Data and AI capabilities is understanding which skills are essential and upskilling their workforce in those skills. Individuals face a similar challenge in understanding where they stand, what to study, and how to learn the skills that will best serve their careers. The World Economic Forum predicts upwards of 150 million new AI-related jobs will be created in the next two years, while only 300,000 AI professionals exist in the global workforce today.

To address this growing challenge, Katanforoosh and Lee took an inventive bottoms-up approach to assessing and benchmarking skills that directly maps to enterprise-wide development. Technical employees use assessments in machine learning, data science, data analytics, and software engineering. Non-technical employees take data literacy assessments to enable a companywide culture of data fluency.

Workera’s adaptive assessments are used to generate personalized curricula from the ocean of content readily available across free and paid platforms, ranging from Arxiv to Github and more. Workera then guides the user to the most effective online course, video, research paper, or other materials, and further evolves the curriculum as the user’s skills develop.

Individuals in 160+ countries are already using Workera to measure their data-AI skills gap and grow new skills. In terms of enterprise upskilling, Workera has clients globally, including the Americas, EMEA and APAC.

Workera will use this investment to further extend its adaptive skills assessments platform. According to Katanforoosh, Workera has an exciting 2021 product roadmap, and is working with an increasing number of enterprises around the world to provide skills transformation.