Brendan Noud spent 8 years working for a learning management system (LMS) company. Over time he became so frustrated with the challenges and length of time customer’s faced to implement their system he decided to build one himself.
He and his colleague Des Anderson joined together to bootstrap their own learning management system company LearnUpon in 2012 and set out to create an easy-to-implement LMS backed by great customer service. Noud became CEO with Anderson handling the technical side as CTO. This founder’s story is based on my interview with Noud.
LearnUpon Co-Founder Brendan Noud.
The Dublin, Ireland-based LearnUpon offers a cloud-based LMS that helps businesses to train their employees, partners, and customers. The company is part of the booming corporate learning and upscaling skills business trend. The global LMS market is projected to grow from $16.19 billion in 2022 to $40.95 billion by 2029, according to Fortune Business Insight.
The bootstrapped business grew slowly but steadily at first, with Noud and Anderson taking turns being available 24/7 to be able to handle customer service calls in the early days. Over time, they built a solution that can be up and running almost instantaneously. Like most SaaS start-ups they sold to smaller businesses and training firms, but the company’s fortune’s changed when they began to break into mid-sized and large enterprise customers.
“We saw an opportunity with external audience training, or extended enterprise training. So companies, not just training their employees, but actually training their customers. For example, software companies training their customers on their software to onboard them quicker and more efficiently, or to train their partners. So that became a really interesting space for us. What we now talk about as multi audience training,” says Noud.
According to Noud, the company now works with the likes of Twilio, Zendesk and many other high growth, software companies as well as associations and sports leagues that use LearnUpon to further their customer training, and then partner training. Today, the nearly 300 employee company serves over 1,300 customers with 13 million-plus learners using their LMS across more than 30 countries with offices across the U.S., Ireland, Serbia, and Sydney.
“As an Irish company, we thought about being an international company from day one. I often get asked how we broke into the US. But I think for us, it was a combination of my previous experience with my former company WBT where I was mainly dealing with U.S. clients, so it was second nature to us. And then necessity. Ireland is a small country, a small market. So we knew if we were going to build a company of any significant scale we would have to focus on the U.S. And today, North America is over 70% of our business,” says Noud.
For its first 8 years, the company had raised a little more than $1 million in angel and seed round venture funds. But the company’s growth prospects changed dramatically with the infusion of $56 million in private equity from Summit Partners in 2020. “We have grown the business pretty significantly after that. We'd always being focused on our cash burn. And so while we were trying to grow aggressively, and that involves investment and hiring, I think we always had that eye on the ball in terms of it was very much tied to our customer growth and our revenue. We knew we were probably leaving some growth on the table, because you have to make some calls on where you make those investments, if that's how you're going to grow the business. And I think we got to a scale where we could just see a really significant opportunity ahead of us,” says Noud.
The company had been saying no to VCs and PE firms and growing without them for a long time. But the more they said no, the more they were interested in talking to LearnUpon. “We came into 2020, feeling the time was right at a board level to bring in some funding to really go after and get LearnUpon to where we wanted to be in terms of our longer term vision to become a market leader,” says Noud.
With Noud and Anderson focused on the business, they felt they didn’t have the time to go through an elaborate process of choosing the right investor. So they picked five investment firms to the pitch process with all five showing keen interest. So why chose Summit?
“For us Summit felt like the right partner in terms of how they really bought into our longer term vision. They were aware of where we had come from, and maybe our earlier customer base, but they weren't overly fixated on that. They were more interested in where we could take this business going forward. And they were probably last for us to talk to but they quickly positioned themselves as being really passionate about the company. And it was little things during the investment process. They talked about “We and us’. And that really makes a difference when you're a founder. It's never a straight line. I think it hasn't been since we started. They've been very supportive on that journey. We will want some sort of liquidity event at some point. But there's no major rush, we have so much potential ahead of us that we really want to give ourselves the best shot at doing that,” says Noud.
Noud grew up in County Kildare, which is about an hour south of Dublin, Ireland surrounded by fields and farms. He is the eldest of three children with a brother and sister. “I think in terms of the journey of ultimately becoming an entrepreneur, part of that is instilled by my parents. My mom had a restaurant right from when we were kids. I think that customer focus and business in general, we were surrounded by it as kids and just things like payroll, scheduling timesheets, dealing with suppliers, tax returns and all of that kind of stuff. I always had an itch to start a business at some stage. It was just finding the right opportunity and the right partner when I met Des at WBT Systems,”
After graduating from University College Dublin with a Bachelor’s degree in Commerce in 1999, Noud worked in consulting for a time before joining WBT Systems where he worked for 8 years in customer success before partnering with Anderson to start LearUpon in 2012.
As for the future? “We've invested very heavily in being an API first company. And we like where learning is going in terms of real time, just-in-time learning. That’s where the future is. And we want to play a key part in that and be recognised globally for being best in class when it comes to getting the right learning to the right people at the right time,” concludes Noud.
