AcademyAI raises £1.65M to close the workplace AI skills gap

AcademyAI has raised £1.65 million in an oversubscribed pre-seed round to build software that measures employees’ AI skills and then trains them for the jobs they actually do. Nexus Family Office and Panthera Family Office were among the investors backing it.

The company is chasing a familiar problem: plenty of organisations hand out AI tools like ChatGPT and Copilot, but far fewer know whether staff can use them in a useful way. AcademyAI, which was co-founded by Alex Packham, Andy Lambert, Michael Walton and Rob Barnett, is trying to turn that fuzzy question into something managers can measure.

Its platform uses a six-axis AI capability framework developed with the Alan Turing Institute Methodology. That framework looks at things such as critical thinking, judgement, prompting, assessing AI-generated outputs and practical AI skills, then identifies gaps before recommending training and use cases that fit each employee’s role.

The training is deliberately short and applied. Instead of long webinars or generic courses, AcademyAI delivers five-minute modules shaped around an organisation’s context, tools and terminology. The system also uses underlying AI models to keep the training content moving as tools and practices change.

For managers and leadership teams, the platform also includes dashboards that show how AI capability is developing across individuals, teams and departments. The new money will go into further product development and expansion as more organisations adopt AI tools, and Packham’s pitch is blunt: the issue is less buying software than knowing whether people can use it properly.