Our mission is to unlock human potential by enabling everyone to benefit equally from AI. 
Manifesto III
Fund III Manifesto: Human Capital Development is a $4T opportunity
As AI creates a $15T+ productivity opportunity, Human Capital Development is emerging as the critical enablement layer that converts technological progress into economic output and human flourishing.
Thesis
The market insights and investment roadmaps we invest by. Each thesis is a starting point for our investments in a category: where we see the market going, and what we want to back next.
Compliance as code – AI will create a whole new SaaS layer to prevent violations, not just detect them
Compliance is one of the most active corners of B2B AI right now, on one promise: the models are finally good enough that the work becomes cheap and fast yet stays reliable. Why does this matter?...
Why enterprise AI isn’t delivering ROI yet – and the infrastructure layer that will change that
Each phase of B2B software – from relational databases to SaaS/cloud – had the same underlying logic: it enabled humans to collaborate by coordinating access to data. AI agents are doing more and...
Services are the new software – but for whom? AI’s $149bn SMB market
SMBs have always been locked out of professional services. Imagine you run a 20-person construction firm. You’re turning over roughly £4 million a year. You have two or three admin staff handling...
Enterprise AI adoption: are ‘forward deployed engineers’ the whole solution?
Something strange is happening in the state of enterprise AI. Almost 90% of companies report using AI in at least one business function, yet only 5% are actually achieving value at scale. The remaining 95% are stuck in the infamous “pilot trap”: endlessly...
AI in healthcare: how tech can transform care outcomes for doctors, nurses and patients
Healthcare has always advanced on the back of new tools, from the stethoscope in 1816 to the MRI in 1977, but each wave also added new strain on the...
The future of talent acquisition: how AI is transforming recruitment and hiring
Companies will spend £757 billion on recruiting this year, yet 74% of hires will underperform expectations and 30% will leave within their first year. This massive inefficiency persists despite decades of technological advancement because we’ve been optimising the...
Defensibility in the age of AI
Every AI startup now faces the same question from investors and customers: how defensible are you? These frameworks set out our thinking, with venture insights that matter to founders.
A defensibility framework for AI startups
The defensible space for AI startups and application layer companies is tasks that frontier labs and hyperscales can’t solve and that end-users can’t vibe code their way to. Here’s a framework for figuring out whether that’s what you’re building
News
We’ve invested in 5U – the agentic AI workforce for European freight forwarding
The phone in your hand crossed an ocean because somebody sat in an inbox at 2am, copying a container number from one screen into another. So did your coffee. So did the chair you’re sitting in. Thirty trillion dollars of global trade, held together by people doing the...
We’re leading Rig’s $2.8M round: the data context layer for the AI era
We’re thrilled to announce that we’re leading the $2.8M first check round of Rig, the data context engine built by Toby Mather and Jakub Langr out of Entrepreneur First. AI is...
VARM raises €17.5M Series A to scale the workforce insulating Europe’s homes
Ironic timing but we're thrilled to share that VARM, the German startup making home insulation scalable, has raised €17.5M in a Series A led by the ABN AMRO Sustainable Impact...
Yoto raises $22M led by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to take screen-free audio for kids global
We’re thrilled to share that Yoto, the screen-free audio platform for children, has raised $22M in a round led by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, with significant participation...
Mendo raises $13.5M Series A to scale enterprise AI adoption in Europe
Mendo, the French startup helping enterprises adopt generative and agentic AI, has raised $13.5M (€12M) in a Series A round led by Educapital, Ventech, Tomcat and OVNI Capital....
Modern Relay raises $3M to build the shared infrastructure layer for enterprise AI
The secret’s finally out! We’re thrilled to announce our investment in Modern Relay, the startup building shared knowledge infrastructure for AI agents in the enterprise. The $3M...
PMF Academy
How did the defining companies in human capital development actually find product-market fit? In this interview series, run with our Venture Partner community, founders and operators who built those companies – Sana, Andela, Multiverse and more – share the playbooks first-hand.
Superintelligence for work – how Sana Labs used vision to fuel a billion-dollar exit
Workday dropped $1.1B to acquire Sana Labs – it was their biggest deal ever, and pretty huge news in the enterprise software world. Joel Hellermark, Sana’s founder and...
How recruitment giant Andela hired their own top team to scale
Andela provides the human compute layer behind modern AI systems – training models, deploying AI-native engineers and upskilling the teams that build them. In 2021,...
How British unicorn Multiverse used a 3-step product discovery process to get their billion-dollar valuation
Now valued at more than $2bn, Multiverse was built to ensure workers don’t get left behind by the rapid pace of technology. To date, the company has delivered more than £2bn in verified ROI for 1,000+ employers, including critical national security with Babcock and...
How to use data to find scalable product-market fit – and get a $750M acquisition in 5 years
Ahmed Haque was Chief Product Officer at Emeritus, the Mumbai-based company that has raised more than $1bn. He was one of the first instructors with Trilogy, and later its Chief Academic Officer. Here, he explains how Trilogy defined their magic, measured it and built...
How to build your first marketing strategy, by a billion-dollar CMO
As VP of global marketing at Blackboard, Natasha Davidson led a team of 40 marketers, orchestrating strategies across diverse business lines and regions. More recently, she was the EMEA chief marketing officer at Coursera (raised $464M before going public in 2021),...
‘Pricing is not science’: how BridgeU monetised and sold direct to customers in the toughest B2B market
“There are lots of ways you can monetise if you build an audience big enough and users or customers feel you’re solving an important pain point,” smiles Lucy Stonehill, describing the journey that she and the BridgeU team have been on since they started their mission...
Manifestos
Fund III Manifesto: Human Capital Development is a $4T opportunity
As AI creates a $15T+ productivity opportunity, Human Capital Development is emerging as the critical enablement layer that converts technological progress into economic output and human flourishing.
Fund II Manifesto: Human Capital Development in the Age of AI
AI is reshaping how we learn, find work and do our jobs. Emerge’s second fund backs founders building across three markets – Learn, Navigate and Work – that will determine who shares in the productivity gains and who is left behind.
Fund I Manifesto: The Origins of Human Capital Development
Demand for new skills is rising faster than the world can supply them. In Emerge’s founding manifesto, our GP and founder Jan Lynn-Matern sets out why the talent and skills system is failing workers and employers alike, and how startups can close the gap.
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