Startup AcademyAI bags £1.65 million in pre-seed funding round to assess and train employees' AI skills
AcademyAI has raised £1.65 million in a pre-seed funding round, to assess and boost employees' AI skills.
The startup assesses employees against a six-axis AI capability framework, built with the Alan Turing Institute Methodology. It identifies gaps in critical thinking, judgement, prompting, evaluating outputs and building skills, and then delivers personalised micro-learning and practical use cases built around each person's real role.
AcademyAI’s training is built around five-minute, applied modules that are role specific and rooted in an organisation's context, tools, and language. The platform is powered by underlying AI models and AI generated. For leadership, it provides dashboards tracking capability growth across individuals, teams and departments.
AcademyAI is co-founded by Alex Packham and Andy Lambert - who founded ContentCal which was later acquired by Adobe for over $100 million - Michael Walton and Rob Barnett, who both invested in ContentCal. Investors include Nexus Family Office and Panthera Family Office
Packham comments: “We closed this round oversubscribed, which tells us investors see the same gap we do. Every company and CEO we talk to has given their teams access to AI tools. Almost none of them know if their people can use them properly. It’s a measurement problem first: leaders don't know what their teams are capable of, so they can't close the distance between buying a tool and getting value from it. Closing the gap between AI adoption and AI outcomes is what we built AcademyAI to do.”
2026 RTIH Innovation Awards
AI will be a key focus area at our sister title RTIH’s 2026 Innovation Awards.
The awards are now open for entries and celebrate global retail technology innovation in a fast moving omnichannel world.
Our winners will be revealed at the 2026 RTIH Innovation Awards Ceremony, taking place at The HAC in Central London on Wednesday, 4th November.
Check out the 2025 winners here.
RTIH’s 2025 hall of fame entrants were revealed during a sold out event which took place at The HAC on 16th October and consisted of a drinks reception, three course meal, and awards ceremony presided over by award winning comedian, actress and writer Tiff Stevenson.
In his welcome speech, Scott Thompson, Founder and Editor, RTIH, said: “This is the awards’ fifth year as a physical event. We started off with just 30 people at the South Place Hotel not far from here, then moved to London Bridge Hotel, then The Barbican, and last year RIBA’s HQ in the West End.”
“But I’m conscious of the fact that, to quote the legend that is Taylor Swift, You’re only as hot as your last hit, baby. So, this year we’ve moved to our biggest venue yet, and also pulled in our largest number of entries to date and broken attendance records.”
He added: “This year’s submissions have without doubt been our best yet. To quote one of the judges: The examples of innovative developments across both traditional and digital retail spaces were truly remarkable.”
