• A startup aiming to be the Roblox of the corporate world has raised $5.7 million.
• Pixaera develops games that companies can use to provide employees with more engaging training.
• Check out the 11-slide pitch deck the London-based startup used to raise funds below.

A British gaming startup that wants to become the “Roblox for professional learning” has raised $5.7 million in new funding.

London-based Pixaera, founded in 2020, aims to make upskilling a more fun experience for employees by creating immersive spaces and a library of games that it says are “true to reality”, moving away businesses more prosaic e-learning formats.

For Mousa Yassin, the CEO of Pixaera and an avid gamer of series like Final Fantasy, the ambition to start the company was driven by the realization of how the gaming world was “so far removed from the professional world”.

“What I saw was that in 2014, 2015, when I started trying VR, the companies that were exploring this space were either learning companies or technical companies that don’t prioritize not the game,” he said.

The “play first” element is key to creating a formation that improves engagement, according to Yassin. Pixaera claims its technology improves retention on training programs by 4.5 times the retention rates of video training programs.

“The fact that you’re the main person in the story, emotionally attached, in control of your decisions, and alone in 3D space – that’s a huge step up in the way we do things today. ‘today’, he said.

Some of his games, for example, provide oil rig workers from oil and gas companies with a gaming experience that teaches them how to master rig fires, giving them what he describes as “all the impact emotional and the pressure” of the task. “safe”.

The games, accessible through an app to integrate into a customer’s existing learning platform and covering topics ranging from leadership to mental health, can be used on both VR headsets and PC.

“In a few years, every company will probably have embedded immersive learning into their infrastructure in some way simply because the results of this mode of learning are so much more effective than if you were a third person watching. a video,” Yassin said.

Yassin added that “the vision is to be an open multiplayer world for professionals” where “avatars connect with each other”, but was wary of the hype around the push to popularize the metaverse – a speculative view of ‘Internet as an immersive space.

The funds were raised in two separate rounds consisting of $1.2m pre-seed funding and $4.5m seed funding led by LocalGlobe, with participation from others including founders of FACEIT, a gaming platform, York IE and sustainability consultants ERM.

The funding comes as investor appetite for speculative tech has waned in recent months amid a global market slowdown.

Yassin acknowledged that investors had expressed concerns about the future of the space, but found LocalGlobe to be fully aligned with the company’s vision.