5 Minutes of reading
Press release. June 22, 2020.
Blended learning specialist Rise Up raises €5 million to accelerate its commercial development and international expansion.
MAIF Avenir is leading this round table alongside IMPACT Partners, a historical shareholder of Rise Up, and bpifrance.
Start-up founded in 2015 by Arnaud and Guillaume Blachon, Rise Up is developing a mixed solution for managing vocational training for companies.
Based on the observation that 85% of the jobs of 2030 do not exist today and that most of the skills gained in training are lost in the first year, Rise Up's mission is to train and encourage employee commitment, as well as to maintain acquired knowledge over time.
To do this, it designs adapted courses that fit into the daily lives of employees, with a solution that combines face-to-face and online training: blended learning.
Growing strongly in a very dynamic market, with recurring revenues multiplied by 3 in one year, the company has seen a 22% increase in the number of training registrations in recent months and a peak of 8,500 connected users in a single day. The company's customers include major French and international groups such as Décathlon, Schneider Electric, IFPASS, Arkea and Bouygues Telecom.
Today, it wants to accelerate its development by penetrating new markets in Europe and by continuing the structuring of its sales team in order to become a reference player in blended learning.
- Arnaud Blachon, Managing Director of Rise Up : « This new round of financing, from long-standing partners who have renewed their confidence in us and major players in innovation capital, should give us the means to pursue our growth in France and internationally and demonstrate the relevance of Blended Learning. It will enable us to invest in our tailor-made technical solutions, for example to automate the personalisation of learning.»
- Mohamed Abdeslam, Investment Director of MAIF Avenir : «We are very pleased to support the development of Rise Up, whose model helps to foster employee commitment through continuous training and thus to preserve human capital within companies. Rise Up also assists people undergoing retraining or professional integration. Its very promising growth illustrates the conviction that drives us as a mission-driven fund: commitment to more inclusive and sustainable models is a powerful lever for financial performance. »
- Aberzak Sifer, Associate Director IMPACT Partners: «The health crisis has underlined the importance of in-company training and accelerated its digitalisation. Employment will be at the heart of the concerns of the coming years. At IMPACT Partners, we have supported from the beginning the Rise up approach which favours professional reconversion and integration in order to create sustainable jobs. The change of uses is a real opportunity for Rise up to combine social and financial performance. »
About Rise Up
Rise Up is an innovative Learning Management Platform (LMS) offering an enhanced learning experience for learners (LXP). It brings together the management of classroom and e-learning training and the creation of content via a tool-author. Rise Up also has a mobile application.
Rise Up allows you to create and manage multimodal training courses (virtual classes, collaborative tools, e-learning modules, forum), making it a specialist in Blended Learning. Accessible on all web and mobile devices in offline mode, the solution is white-labeled and takes the appearance of the company or customer training centre. With the mobile application, training is accessible where and when employees want it. Sessions of 5, 10 or 15 min. allow to review knowledge and many features make the learning experience particularly fluid. Rise Up supports its customers in the use of its solution and encourages the exchange of best practices between administrators.
More information is available at : https://riseup.ai/
Press : Anne-Cécile Poilvert : anne-cecile@riseup.ai – Tél. : +33 (0)6 95 69 93 50
About MAIF Avenir
Created in 2015, MAIF Avenir is the MAIF Group's innovation capital fund. With €250 million in assets under management and 34 investments made, MAIF Avenir provides support through capital investment to start-ups that aim to develop the services and technologies of tomorrow for individual, collective and sustainable progress. In 2020, MAIF Avenir became the first innovation capital fund to become a company with a mission in France.
More information is available at: www.maif-avenir.fr
Press : Emilie de Chezelles : maif@clai2.com – Tél. : +33 (0)7 77 26 24 60
About IMPACT Partners
Created in 2007 with the conviction that entrepreneurship can contribute to building a more inclusive and sustainable society, IMPACT Partners is a management company with a social vocation. It provides financial and human support to entrepreneurs who are changing scale with the Impact Croissance fund (from €1 to €10M) as well as to all those who want to create their own business in a working-class neighbourhood with the Impact Création fund (from €50k to €500K).
A pioneer in impact investing, IMPACT Partners, with more than €200M under management, supports innovative entrepreneurs throughout Europe in Paris, Frankfurt, Copenhagen or Barcelona.
More information on: www.impact.fr
Press : Marc Sémof : marc.semof@influenceetstrategie.fr - Tel. : +33 (0) 6 14 77 94 11