LearnUpon can now draw on $50M (about €44.6M) from Claret Capital Partners to grow its training software, which businesses use to teach their staff, customers and members. Both firms call the deal a non-dilutive growth financing facility, so the Dublin company’s existing shareholders keep their stakes.
Claret, a London-based firm that calls itself Europe’s largest independent growth debt fund manager, is providing the money from its Fund IV. The firm closed a €575M fundraise in September, with €440M of it going into that fund. Fund IV’s backers include the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund (ISIF), the state-backed investor.
LearnUpon says the money will go into faster product development, a bigger international presence and acquisitions. At heart it sells a learning management system (LMS), software where companies host courses, assign training and track who has finished it. The company says more than 1,700 organisations and 31 million users rely on it.
Brendan Noud, its co-founder and chief executive, tied the deal to the company’s bet on AI. “We believe the real winner in the AI era won’t just be the fastest technology, but the organisations that best unlock human potential,” he said. “This $50M facility fuels our vision to pioneer agentic learning.”
From Course Library To AI Agents
“Agentic learning” refers to the Agentic Learning Platform, the product LearnUpon launched in July. In the company’s telling, leaders decide the business goals, while software agents take over the admin, pick course material as needs change and work on closing skill gaps.
The control layer, LearnUpon IQ, runs a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, a standard connector that lets outside assistants such as Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT reach a company’s learning data. Alongside it, a Profile Hub tracks skills, a Content Hub handles course building and a Delivery Hub brings training into daily work, partly through a chat assistant called Ask Lia.
LearnUpon claims older learning software can leave professionals spending up to 80% of their daily effort managing the system rather than developing people.
“We didn’t want to just rush another AI tool to market and ask learning teams to operate on blind trust,” Noud said at the launch.
Des Anderson, the co-founder who serves as chief technology officer, put it more plainly. “Technology must actively work for our customers, not the other way around,” he said.
Buying Its Way Into Course Writing
LearnUpon has already used one acquisition to speed up its course tools. In November 2025 it bought Courseau, a Berlin startup founded in 2023 whose AI authoring tool helps companies turn in-house expertise into training and translate it into more than 120 languages.
That technology arrived inside LearnUpon’s own platform as Create+ in March 2026. Courseau also carries on as a standalone authoring tool, now renamed CreateUpon and headquartered in Dublin. “Courseau was the right name for what we started building. CreateUpon is the right name for what we’ve become,” said Ro Ren, its co-founder.
Philip Treacy, a vice president at Claret, said, “LearnUpon has built a strong, scaled business and is now moving quickly to capture the opportunity agentic AI is creating in corporate learning.” He added that Claret was glad to back the company as it speeds up both its organic growth and its acquisition strategy.
Customers From Waymo To World Rugby
Claret’s announcement names Waymo, the Alphabet-owned self-driving car company, the British autonomous driving startup Wayve and World Rugby among LearnUpon’s customers. The company’s own website adds Henry Schein, The Adecco Group, Transamerica and USA Football.
Outside Dublin, LearnUpon lists offices in London, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, Belgrade and Sydney. It says it serves more than 100 customers across Asia and the Pacific, and in March it said it would move its Sydney team into larger premises in May after local headcount grew 80% in two years.
Founded In Dublin In 2012
Noud and Anderson started LearnUpon in 2012. Its first outside money was a €550,000 seed round in 2014, led by an American angel investor with support from Enterprise Ireland, the state agency that helps Irish companies grow abroad.
Its first big raise came in October 2020, when growth equity firm Summit Partners made a $56M minority growth equity investment. LearnUpon then had 180 staff and more than 1,000 customers, Zendesk and Twilio among them. By early 2022 its headcount had reached 260.
Since that equity round, the customer count the company reports has grown from over 1,000 to more than 1,700. The Claret facility adds money on top of that base without handing out new shares.
Where LearnUpon Goes From Here
LearnUpon now has a bigger pool of money to call on as it turns a long-established training system into an AI-driven one, with its ownership left as it was. The claims about what its agents can do are the company’s own.
Its stated plans are more product work, more countries and more deals like Courseau. Noud frames the goal less as building the fastest technology than as helping organisations get the most from their people.
