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The Story of LearnUpon: Our Company Timeline
LearnUpon has always been driven by our hardworking people, loyal customers and impactful product. But every great story has to have a beginning. Now we’ve reached our 10th birthday, we’re looking back over the last decade to share the story of LearnUpon LMS, and the people who made it what it is today.
Milestones
Throughout the years, LearnUpon has had amazing highlights and what’s a story without it’s major plot points? Let’s discover our important milestones together.
Our customer journey
Customers have consistently seen the potential in LearnUpon, leading to our constant growth. Way back in June 2012, LearnUpon secured its very first customer. Brendan and Des were excited to show just how impactful LearnUpon LMS could be for an organization.
Just 18 months later, LearnUpon LMS hit its hundredth customer. And, as of February 2022, we have over 1,300 customers worldwide, including Zendesk and Gusto.
So what does that actually add up to? Well, in 2016, LearnUpon was used by a total of 1 million users. Fast forward to 2022 and we’ve grown to a whopping 12.5 million. We’re proud to have so many users log in to our platform to deliver and engage with growth-driving training every day.
The people who make it
Every story needs its heroes, and we think our employees deserve this title! Without their hard work, commitment and dedication, LearnUpon LMS wouldn’t be what it is today.
Brendan and Des hired their first employee way back in August 2013. July 2019 saw us hit 100 employees and now we have just over 270 employees located all over the globe. But our team is still growing. Just take a look at the many career opportunities we have available or find out what it’s really like to work at LearnUpon.
Key investments
First investors
LearnUpon secured our first major investment thanks to Enterprise Ireland, who work in partnership with Irish enterprises to help them start, grow, innovate and win export sales in global markets. We were also involved in the National Digital Research Centre’s (NDRC) Launchpad Program. This is regarded as one of Europe’s premier accelerator programmes, as they seek ambitious entrepreneurs with digital ideas and products that have the potential to scale globally.
Summit Partners
In October 2020, we were delighted to announce a major investment from global growth equity firm Summit Partners. We secured a $56 million minority investment that has and will continue to be used to drive investment in our team, and our platform, as we progress on our journey of helping businesses worldwide to unlock the power of learning. On announcing the funding, Antony Clavel, a Principal with Summit Partners, who joined LearnUpon’s Board of Directors had this to say about LearnUpon:
“With its modern, cloud-based learning management system, strong product development organization, demonstrated dedication to customer success and capital efficient go-to-market model, we believe LearnUpon is strongly positioned to serve this growing and increasingly critical market need. We are thrilled to support Brendan and the LearnUpon team in this next phase of growth.”
Platform updates
Here at LearnUpon, we have a drive to succeed, and that means keeping up-to-date and pushing for our LMS to be the best out there. Over the past 10 years we’ve released updated versions of our Portals, added the tools that can be integrated with LearnUpon and launch new and improved features like Dynamic Rules. Scroll down to our ‘Features throughout the years’ section for more.
Website evolution
There’s nothing quite as satisfying as a surprising before and after side by side comparison. And our website’s evolution is no different! As LearnUpon has grown, so has our brand, messaging and imagery. Just like any main character, we’ve been evolving and improving, with our key website updates, following the launch of our first website in 2012, taking place in June 2014, June 2017, August 2019 and August 2022. Take a look at our major homepage updates throughout the years:
One of the biggest changes you’ll see are the images we use. While we were delighted with our website at the time, we love our more modern fresh look! Take a minute to look at the LMS features. You’ll notice that we’ve continued to add more, so our customers get the very best from their LMS.
The new look LearnUpon
From 2019 to 2020, LearnUpon experienced tremendous growth. With so much positive change, we felt it was time to create a new brand look and message for LearnUpon; one that mirrors who we, as a company, are today, and who we aspire to be tomorrow.
First, let’s take a look at our logo. The changes to it have been subtle – more space, more roundness, two-toned and featuring our new blue. See if you can spot the difference:
Along with our new logo, we thought it was time to update our color palette. Blue has always been at the heart of LearnUpon’s color scheme. Trustworthy and dependable, it represents who we are as a business. Our Creative team worked hard to find the right blue to represent our new brand, the energetic team and enthusiastic customer-base behind it. Fresh, vibrant, enthusiastic, this brighter shade was affectionately nicknamed ‘Future blue’ by our Creative team.
Awards
We believe LearnUpon LMS is one of the best learning solutions out there, but of course we do – it’s our product after all! We’re always looking for new ways to showcase how impactful our LMS is, and awards help us to do just that. Over the years, we’ve been recognized by many top training organizations. Here’s just a snapshot of the awards we’ve won:
We entered the SME Awards in 2015 and won the ‘Customer Focus’, ‘B2B Export’ and ‘Grand Prix’ categories. Winning the ‘Customer Focus’ category was a particularly proud moment for Brendan and Des – it reinforced their vision to deliver the best possible support to our customers, an achievement that many other LMSs fall short of.
In 2018 and 2017 we entered the Deloitte Flash 50 Awards. 2017 was our first year entering the awards, making it a special honor to be named one of the fastest growing technology companies in Ireland.
Also in 2018, we took the top spot in the Technology Ireland Awards. This award celebrates technology companies who have achieved exceptional success, developed innovative technologies and partnerships, and attained significant sales results. To win this so early on in LearnUpon’s journey solidified that we were on the right track to helping people to unlock the power of learning.
More recently, we’ve taken home gold in the Brandon Hall Group Excellence in Technology Awards and HCM Excellence Awards. Check out our badges:
Achievements
Over the past 10 years, LearnUpon has continued to grow and improve. Let’s take a look at our biggest achievements.
Learning Impact
In the fall of 2019, our team decided to embark on a new venture – our first customer-focused learning conference. We wanted to bring together inspirational industry leaders and knowledgeable professionals to create a brand new community for corporate learning.
Scheduled for October 2020, we started working to create the event, but, due to the pandemic, it became apparent that hosting an in-person conference wouldn’t be safe for our team or our attendees. So, Learning Impact, the digital thought leadership series, was born.
In 2021, one year on from launching Learning Impact and, with speakers from NASA, ROI Institute, McDonalds, Salesforce and Netflix, the series was, and continues to be, a massive success!
Whether it’s practical advice to implement into your learning programs, gaining new perspectives from experts outside of the corporate training world, or hearing high-level strategy insights from some of the top leaders in L&D and customer success, Learning Impact has something to offer for anyone at any level of the training and customer success fields.
LearnUpon’s Customer University
Our very own Customer University was launched in 2020. It was set up to streamline implementation, increase retention, and ensure customers get value from our product as soon as possible.
Thanks to this initiative, we have stronger relationships after the implementation due to more elevated post training conversations and less reliance on customer support.
Experience LearnUpon
Throughout our 10 years we saw a need to show learning leaders who create, manage and deliver training, how a powerful, intuitive learning management system can maximize the impact of their L&D programs.
So, in March 2021 we launched Experience LearnUpon, which gives you the opportunity to try out a user-friendly LMS from the learner perspective, by taking a course in our LMS. We offer a range of courses, like ‘Building Effective Online Training with Tim Slade’ and ‘Using Video to Power Your Blended Learning Strategy’.
A friendly, supportive team who like to have fun
In March 2020, we made the decision to protect our employees and their families by seamlessly transitioning to a remote working organization overnight. So, throughout the pandemic, and like many people, we worked from home. Thanks to the systems and technology we invested in, our team can work effectively regardless of location.
Fast forward to today and we’ve implemented a hybrid working system. Our employees can work fully remote or hybrid or full-time from our offices, which are open to all employees through hot-desking. So how did we keep our culture alive in this dynamic working environment? Just like we adapted to working online, we began having fun and connecting online.
Our People Operations team worked hard to keep us well and safe during the pandemic.
In June 2021, they launched LupWell, an online learning program aimed at spreading awareness about the importance of minding your mental health and wellbeing. We also updated our Culture Code – we believe that:
We all own the LearnUpon culture and we are all Guardians of it. Everyone in LearnUpon should celebrate when our values are followed, and feel comfortable highlighting when they are not being followed.
10 years of redefining what an LMS should be through innovative features
LearnUpon was founded with innovation in mind, and that shines most when we deep-dive into our feature evolution. Laser-focused on every user’s experience, our team has always strived to build a solution that makes learning a simple and engaging thing to do.
Seamless, centralized learning management for admins
Our first move in shaping the LearnUpon product was Portals, a feature that unlocks a seamless admin experience. By allowing admins to set up distinct learning environments, multiple audiences with unique learning goals could be easily trained under one roof.
Portals were a big selling point from the get-go, hooking in some of our earliest customers like Marshall E-Learning (that now has over 250+ portals alone!). And today, they continue to be a pillar of LearnUpon for customers like Gusto, Netskope, and beyond.
Over the years, we’ve continued to champion better admin experiences. First, was the introduction of features like certifications and credits – all with automated workflows, of course – that drive for success for Gusto’s partner certification program and Craneware’s customer Academy.
Then, in July, 2017, Auto-Assign Rules meant customers could automate user enrollments at scale. And, last year, this was supercharged with the bigger and better Dynamic Rules – an upgrade that makes managing and tailoring learning effortless for customers, like Edrington.
Learner-centric to our core
For our learners, the core users of our product, we had the vision: build a solution that not only helped them engage with the training at hand but kept them coming back for more.
So, we invested heavily in learner-centric features.
We went mobile in April 2015, launching version 1 of our iOS app, enabling easy access to learning on the go. Now, after seven years, it’s more powerful than ever; we’ve even added a sibling app for Android.
At the same time, we went from only saying ‘Hello’ to saying ‘Olá’, ‘Ciao’, ‘Nǐ hǎo’, and more to our learners by adding new languages to our platform. And today, with 23 out-of-the-box platform languages (and counting), we’re proud to offer a multilingual LMS that allows global companies, like Signify, to reach their learners worldwide.
One of the biggest learner feature launches came in 2017 with our much-anticipated introduction to Gamification. Loved by customers like Brown Thomas Arnotts, it motivates learners and shines a spotlight on high-performers through leaderboards, badges, and points.
With Gamification unlocked, we haven’t stopped since. Forums, Notifications, Catalogs, Reminders, Banners…the list goes on and we’re continuously adding to or upgrading these in the platform. And, perhaps the most exciting addition of all came last year with our first step in machine learning. Through Course Recommender learners get an enhanced training experience, with predictive course recommendations helping users discover and engage with the content they want — before they know they want it.
Connecting data, unlocking automation
At LearnUpon, we believe every business should be able to use the tools they need and critically, those tools should play nice together. That’s why we’ve devoted much of the last 10 years to building best-in-class integrations; and they came quick and fast.
Kicking off with our open API, customers like Smartbear have been able to do cool things to save its admin’s time and effort, like bringing customers from shopping cart to portal automatically. And for customers who preferred an out-of-the-box eCommerce experience, we introduced our eCommerce Storefront, supporting multiple payment integrations.
In 2016, we developed our first of many webinar integrations. Starting with WebEx, we now have Zoom, MS Teams, and lots, lots more that enable customers like Premium Retail Services and ACE Fitness to seamlessly deliver blended learning.
From there, came Salesforce. Called ‘beautiful’ by our customer Chargepoint, this was a major feature milestone for us. Allowing customers to sync training data and learners to access their training right within the CRM, it’s the best in the game.
Today, we have a long list of integrations – Zapier, Intercom, Zendesk, Gong… – and plenty more to come. This doesn’t even include our awesome partnership integrations, like Impact, 15Five, and Degreed, where customers like Edrington customers can harness the power of Degreed’s learning experience platform, along with our learning management system through a ready-made integration.
Doubling down on our UI
Most importantly, throughout the years, what’s been a constant for LearnUpon is our user interface. From tweaks here and there to a full overhaul in 2016, it’s a key part of our product experience that we always prioritize.
Purposefully simple to use, it’s been part of so many of our customers’ journeys to success, like Sonic Automotive. And stay tuned, as 2022 is going to be another exciting year for LearnUpon’s UX & UI.
The road ahead
LearnUpon has always believed that the key to unlocking the power of learning is through a modern, user-friendly product with expert customer-focused people. Over the last 10 years, we’ve strived to practice what we preach – by constantly improving our product, consistently investing in our employees, and actively engaging in customer feedback.
As our CEO, Brendan Noud says, “I hope in 10 years’ time, we’re further on in that journey and when you stop someone on the street and ask them to name an LMS, LearnUpon will be their answer.”
Here’s to many more years of LearnUpon!
