OpenSesame

Founded by Don Spear, Joshua Blank, Aaron Bridges, and Tom Turnbull in 2011, OpenSesame is a marketplace for corporate e-learning courses. The platform connects content providers with businesses and their employees who access courses through the firm's learning management system (LMS). While businesses can select courses based on their learning needs, OpenSesame also acts as an e-learning advisor, curating courses for businesses’ training programs and working with them to increase utilization and improve learner engagement. It also offers Connectivity and Conversations (launched in April 2022), a workplace mental health training for managers providing tools, tips, and strategies to encourage mental health wellness conversations at the workplace. As of April 2022, OpenSesame's library contained more than 20,000 courses in more than 19 languages.

OpenSesame is reportedly the first marketplace to fully comply with the accessibility specifications of the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM), a collection of standards and specifications for web-based educational technology—an initiative of the US Department of Defense.

Key customers and partnerships

The company has entered into several partnerships since its 2011 founding. In 2020, SumTotal, a talent development platform provider, and Inkling, a provider of digital learning solutions, made OpenSesame's catalog available on their platforms. It also partnered with The Jeff Havens Company and the American Management Association (AMA) to expand its library of courses. In July 2021, the company partnered with Blinkist, which provides 15-minute summaries of business and non-fiction books, to provide 150 book summaries on its OpenSesame Plus subscription. OpenSesame also partnered with Microsoft to make its e-learning content library available on Microsoft’s Viva Learning platform. In August 2021, the company announced its partnership with Axonify to expand the OpenSesame plus subscription to include Axonify’s microlearning courses. In September 2021, the company announced the addition of Eleventure to its OpenSesame Plus subscription. In August 2022, the firm partnered with Gyrus Systems, a learning management systems provider, to automate and streamline training and compliance materials.

Funding and financials

The company raised USD 50 million in July 2021 which will be allocated toward further global expansion, new partnerships to provide additional courses, and M&A, in line with its mission to be a world leader in online business training.