As OpenAI rolls out a social media app for videos generated by artificial intelligence (AI), a Canadian startup has built an AI platform that helps Nvidia and other Fortune 500 companies create corporate training videos.
Karine Bah Tahé used to craft training content for corporate clients with tens of thousands of employees through her company Blue Level. The firm delivered training in human resources, soft skills, and diversity, equity, and inclusion to corporations such as Deloitte, Apple, and Colgate.
But putting together content would take months, and it wasn’t easily scalable across different departments and languages. Bah Tahé, a graduate of Concordia University’s John Molson School of Business, took her years of experience in corporate training and found an opportunity for automation.
“I saw all these inefficiencies and scattered tools,” Bah Tahé told BetaKit in an interview. “It created a lack of access to the most impactful and relevant education you could get as an employee.”
The entrepreneur co-founded Oasis Learning AI to build a productivity tool for custom training courses for companies with huge employee bases. The AI-powered platform creates an automated pipeline from an employee submitting a training module request to managers designing and customizing a video. The videos can range from cartoon-like to hyperrealistic and can be customized with plug-ins for existing design apps like Canva.
Outside of its custom video product, Oasis offers clients a library of preset videos on topics like harassment prevention and cultural competence. Clients can also book workshops with human facilitators in a more traditional workplace training model.
“Our ultimate goal is to completely transform how fast employees can learn by delivering highly customized, just-in-time training,” Bah Tahé said.
Her startup raised $1.5 million in SAFEs and convertible notes earlier this year from lead investor BKR Capital, BDC Thrive Lab, Capital M Ventures, The Firehood, Techstars Chicago, and Women’s Equity Lab Toronto. Oasis also won cash prizes at SAAS North and Elevate’s Women+ program in the fall of last year.
Lise Birikundavyi, co-founder and managing partner at BKR Capital, is joining the Oasis board, while Olga Cruz of BDC Thrive Lab will take an advisory role.
Birikundavyi told BetaKit that Oasis pushes the boundaries of corporate learning by allowing companies to more easily tailor learning experiences and meet employees where they are.
“The company was founded on a genuine care for employee growth, and that ethos is deeply personal for every member of their team,” she said. “They are a global, diverse, and inclusive group by nature, connecting the dots in ways that few others can.”
According to the BDC’s latest annual report, the bank is on track to support nearly 23,000 women founders in Canada by fiscal 2027. It has recently bolstered its support for women through initiatives like its 2022 commitment of $500 million to women-led Canadian startups and funds through the Thrive platform.
The Oasis product stack is serving a market increasingly interested in leveraging AI to speed up processes. The number of Canadian businesses using the technology to produce goods or deliver services was 12.2 percent in May, which was double the year before, according to Statistics Canada.
The startup, which has eight full-time employees, is catering to large enterprises, including global chip maker Nvidia, tech giant Apple, and Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre in Los Angeles. Oasis claims to implement multiple layers of security to protect client data through industry-standard encryption. Bah Tahé said her company doesn’t use customer data to train Oasis, which relies on a mix of large language models to power different tasks.
Oasis plans to use the funding to hire more engineers, accelerate product development, and deliver better training solutions, according to CTO Michael Thu. He added that the startup is investing in enterprise-grade security and compliance certifications to serve larger customers, including ISO 27001 certification.
Feature image courtesy Business Development Bank of Canada.