Yahoo Finance ‘If you become too fixed to anything, it’s hard to survive’
Jennifer Sieg meets Chibeza Agley, co-founder of Cambridge tech firm Obrizum, to hear how adapting your product to evolving industry trends is key to long-term survival.
Chibeza Agley, co-founder of AI-powered digital learning firm Obrizum, can still remember the day he knew his team was destined for success.
Agley co-founded Obrizum with two of his Cambridge scientist colleagues in 2015 as a way to manually break down and distribute complex information into an easy-to-navigate content system for science and healthcare professionals.
However, the founders didn’t realise what they could achieve until they started to incorporate AI.
“We had some eureka moments,” Agley, 37, says with a smile.
“One of those eureka moments was we developed a system that was able to contextualise information, irrespective of subject, sector or level and that unlocked Obrizum as it is today because we weren’t ring-fenced to the life sciences and healthcare – we can work in any domain.”
How it works
Obrizum now delivers tens of millions of user metrics and data points each month to learners worldwide through several multi-million, multi-year partnerships in various industries, including defence and education.
The most recent notable partnership was earlier this year with BAE Systems, which made the British defence giant the first in its industry to create an AI-powered learning system to make its military trainees “mission ready sooner”.
So, what would make an enterprise choose to partner with Obrizum instead of other well-known learning and content management systems, such as Moodle, Skillshare, or even LinkedIn Learning?
Agley says it all comes down to the creation of knowledge spaces and data collection, as Obrizum brings the worlds of classrooms, personalised learning, and simulation-based training together into one “galaxy” of modules.
“Every single other program builds courses – module one, module two, module three – any online program is structured as it’s always been structured in modules,” Agley says.
“We built high dimensional knowledge spaces – which are galaxies – as a different way to represent the idea of the relationships between content.
“Unlike anything else out there, we’re able to measure – really accurately – when it’s working, and measure the quality of the content and the data that we get back from those experiences. We can prove what we say.”
Flexibility
Adapting to the needs of the market is crucial if your start-up has any chance of longevity – especially when tapping into the global e-learning market, which is on track to reaching $848bn by 2030.
For Agley, remaining flexible as a start-up – and understanding the way his first product worked was far from the final version – is invaluable.
“Scientists are inventors,” he says.
“In the day to day work you have to invent just to get by, like it’s just a standard practice, every day you’re inventing some tool to help you do your job.”
His plan from the start? Knowing what you want and how to construct the right path to achieve it.
You have to have a very, very strong vision for what you want to do with the business so that you don’t just accept every bit of advice you get.
Chibeza Agley
“If you become too fixed to anything, it’s hard to survive.”
As with any new venture, you’re going to have “a billion rejections” at first, but only one ‘yes’ is needed to hit the ground running.
What’s next
In January of last year, Obrizum announced its Series A funding round of $11.5m (£9m), bringing its total to date to $17m (£13m).
With even more growth and strategic partnership on the horizon, the entrepreneur seems optimistic for what’s to come, both for Obrizum and the world of AI and disruptive technology.
“Creating a product which could disrupt an industry and will change the way an industry works – that’s what I’m really doing here,” Agley says.
“In the meantime, if we make a billion pounds, that is excellent for us and our shareholders, but we’re really trying to prove that we can morph an industry into something that wasn’t there before and is different and valuable.”
CV
Name: Dr. Chibeza C. Agley
Company: Obrizum
Staff: 45
Title: Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer
Age: 37
Born: London
Lives: Cambridge
Studied: Physiology, Stem Cell Biology, Genetics, Biophysics
Talents: Inventing!
Motto: A quote borrowed from William Arthur Ward: “The price of success is discipline; the cost of mediocrity is disappointment”
Most known for: Obrizum!
First ambition: To make a scientific discovery
Favourite book: On the Origin of Species
