A Textbook Example of Success

Enterprise learning (or AI-enabled learning) startup and content-authoring leader LearnExperts is transforming the way we design and develop training material, and Ontario’s angel investors have helped propel CEO Sarah Sedgman to the top of the class.  

By Lisa van de Geyn

Honouring International Women’s Month, Ottawa’s Capital Angel Network and the National Angel Capital Organization are proud to feature a series of stories celebrating the women who mobilize angel investment for Canada’s bold women entrepreneurs. 

On a Monday in mid-February, Sarah Sedgman sent a note to her company’s investors to announce the kickoff of her latest fundraise. The CEO of Ottawa-based LearnExperts—the company’s learning-content-creation tool allows customers to generate knowledge-sharing and training programs easier and faster—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 names of investors she hoped to connect with and 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,” she says. “Within two days it was nearly filled with angels offering to help me take this next step.” It might not seem like a big ask, but it’s another example of the pivotal role these backers have played in Sedgman’s journey: Angel investors have been there since the company’s inception, and not only do these dedicated folks continue to support her with much-needed dollars, but angels are among the first to jump in when she’s looking for networking opportunities, advice and more. You could say the relationship Sedgman has built with these investors is grade A. 

As a former course developer and chief knowledge officer, Sedgman has plenty of experience with the super-slow, super-outdated way training content and materials have always been created. This knowledge and understanding of the pain points gave her confidence to leave the corporate world (where she’d 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 eLearning, micro-learning, presentations, webinars, videos, job aids and ePub. Users upload presentations, web pages, documents and/or raw video content, LEAi applies a learning framework and automatically writes the course content following best practices leveraging AI, and then exports learning content in a variety of formats. With LEAi, educational courses and programs in myriad industries are now being developed effortlessly, more cost-effectively and quickly. Building just one hour of course material the old-fashioned way could take up to 250 hours of development, but 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,” she 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 they had interest from early adopters (such as Ceridian and OpenText), she knew she’d need outside investment to keep up with market demands. “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 advisor and sounding board since,” she says. When it was time to fundraise in March 2021, Elvidge connected Sedgman with her Ottawa-based angel group, Capital Angel Network (CAN), and she was exceptionally successful there—22 angels participated in due diligence, and 15 invested; it was the largest investment in terms of number of angels in the group’s history. After, 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. 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 cofounder 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 joining CAN and becoming one of SheBoot’s founding volunteers. (SheBoot is an investment-readiness program that aims to prepare women founders to pitch their innovations and secure funding; it was jointly established by CAN and Invest Ottawa and today is a standalone entity). Her relationship with LearnExperts is unique—while she’s made more than 20 investments in her years as an angel, Sedgman is the founder she’s worked most closely with. “I thought Sarah was special. 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,” Elvidge says, adding the concept of the company also appealed to her. “I was familiar with how hard it was to create learning material. 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 (she was the third woman to join CAN). It also didn’t take long for her 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 their growth trajectory. Just last year, the company grew more than 400 percent, and customers increased by more than 500 percent. As Sedgman moves into her next stage of raising, 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.”