Meet Matteo Penzo, CEO and Co-founder of Social E-Learning Platform: zick learn

Tell us about zick learn

zick learn is like WhatsApp, but for e-learning. We leverage the scientific theories of microlearning and spaced learning to revolutionise the training process for companies and their staff. The platform changes the way employees learn in corporations, by delivering text-based micro lessons to basically any corporate chat client on the market.

Today, 95% of standard e-learning fails. Sometimes this is because people are not completing their training, and other times, the training transforms them into what we call ‘skip factories’ – when you keep pressing ‘next’ on every slide to get to the end in the fastest time possible.
We believe learning – and not just being trained – is a fundamental right of every employee. But with this right comes an obligation for the employer. With zick learn, organisations can bump up completion rates to over 85%, and employee engagement to 97%.
 
 

 
 

How did you come up with the idea for zick learn?

 
While working at Frog Design, I was known as the employee who skipped all mandatory training from our parent company. The sessions were unuseful and lengthy, taking me from my teams and my Clients. I knew there had to be a frictionless way to be trained in the flow of work, without being forced to take time out for training.

zick learn is the future of corporate learning – a way of spending just a couple of minutes on a subject, and memorising it for the longest time possible. It’s a way of being trained when I want, at a time that makes sense, rather than in a disruptive manner.
 

How has zick learn evolved over the last couple of years?

When I joined the founders team at the end of 2021, we just had a nice idea and a working prototype. I focused on building a scalable strategy and partnered with UC Berkeley, setting the learning science foundation of our product. We then started to raise capital from business angels, using that money to hire our product team in Ukraine, and bring to market our MVP in August 2022. From there, we parallelised sales of the MVP and fundraising with the growth of the feature pipeline.

Today, zick learn operates on MS Teams, Slack, Webex and WhatsApp. It can concurrently deliver training on multiple channels, and in multiple languages, using an AI technology that has been trained for over 15 years by more than 20,000 professional translators. It also integrates with enterprise grade applications such as SAP and Oracle, as well as with other LMS platforms.
 

What can we hope to see from zick learn in the future?

We are building the foundation of a proprietary AI that will transform our Client’s existing learning content – such as videos and slides – into properly formatted text-based micro training. Moreover, it will be able to detect the best moment to share the lessons with each individual learner, based on their behavioural patterns, thus increasing engagement and reducing time to completion.
The complexity here lies in the dataset to train the AI. We expect this feature to hit the market following the closure of our forthcoming seed round.