Backing Visibly

The last place you expect to meet an entrepreneur you will invest in is on a bus. Yet that is exactly where I first crossed paths with Kane St Quintin, the founder of Visibly. To be fair, it wasn’t just any bus: it was a 50 passenger shuttle back to Paris from the Brighteye Portfolio Summit Day, hosted in the beautiful French countryside. Lucky for me, Paris rush hour traffic provided a two hour opportunity to get to know my seatmate. 

As Kane told me about his experience turning around multiple highway services businesses from administration into digital-first, profitable companies followed by founding his first venture backed company in 2018 in the blue collar space, it was impossible to not get excited by his depth of knowledge about the blue collar industry he grew up in and his passion for solving its problems.

Even more exciting was what Kane was building with his current startup, Visibly. Visibly tackles the skills and training gap for skilled blue-collar workers, a problem Kane knew all too well from his own family business and his prior founder experience working with infrastructure companies across the UK. Visibly’s tech platform provides mobile-first, real-time certification and training. This is delivered on-demand, adapted to individual capabilities, and provides advantages office workers take for granted: peer-to-peer feedback and expert-led coaching. 

If you walk the streets of London every day you will see countless construction zones, cranes, and blue-collar workers literally building the world around us. In the UK alone, over 3 million people work in construction: as much as 9% of the working population. The 5G fibre rollout in the UK, the green energy transition to solar and heat pumps - these are all massive economic tailwinds that require labor in this sector to catch up to the latest regulated standards and training required. How are these trainings delivered today? Workers sitting in a windowless classroom, staring at a 20 question paper assessment.

Like many transformational companies we have backed, Visibly’s insight is to build for the customer and user experience in a market where the incumbents simply don’t care. Customers love this. Today, Visibly already works with some of the largest energy and infrastructure companies in the UK, including Hitachi, Kier and SRL. As SRL puts it: “Giving our users ongoing access to expert-led training and testing their competence through Visibly makes sure they're doing their jobs safely and effectively.”

Thanks to that October bus ride, we are so excited to welcome Visibly to the Creandum family, and to be leading the $7.5M Seed alongside our friends at Seedcamp, Brighteye, Triple Point and others. If you want to take a seat on their journey, they are hiring!