BoodleBox CEO reflects on $5 million raise and building AI that works with people

Following BoodleBox’s recent funding round, CEO France Q. Hoang has shared a personal reflection on what the raise means for the company’s direction, its users, and its approach to human-AI collaboration in education and work.

BoodleBox CEO France Q. Hoang has spoken publicly about the company’s recent $5 million funding round, framing the milestone less as a financial achievement and more as validation of a specific view of how artificial intelligence should be used in education and the workforce.

In a LinkedIn post shared following the announcement, Hoang reflects on the challenges of building an EdTech platform centered on collaboration with AI rather than automation. His comments come as BoodleBox continues to expand its presence across higher education and workforce training, with broader implications for AI skills, learning design, and how institutions prepare people for AI-enabled work.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen”

Hoang opens his post by acknowledging the scale of the raise and his own reaction to it. “I’m sitting here staring at this announcement, and I’m a little overwhelmed,” he writes. “BoodleBox just raised $5 million.”

Rather than focusing on the investors involved, Hoang frames the moment as unexpected given early skepticism around the company’s prospects. “When we started, people told me that there was no way to compete with existing multi-billion dollar companies. That Higher Ed moves too slow. That we’d never get workforce teams to adopt collaborative AI.”

According to Hoang, progress came not from speed or scale, but from engagement. “Then something beautiful happened: educators showed up. Students showed up. Professionals embraced it. They didn’t just use BoodleBox—they shaped it.”

Human-AI collaboration as the goal

At the center of Hoang’s message is a clear distinction between using AI to replace work and using it to strengthen human thinking. He writes that the funding means “we get to build a future where AI amplifies human potential instead of replacing it.”

He adds that the goal is not simply AI adoption, but collaboration. “It means a student or worker doesn’t just learn to use AI—they learn to collaborate with it in ways that make their thinking sharper, their creativity deeper, their impact bigger.”

Hoang points to the platform’s current reach as evidence of demand for that approach, noting that “70,000+ learners and workers across 1,200+ campuses and hundreds of organizations are becoming AI-ready,” as economies shift toward new forms of human-AI work.

Credit shared with educators, students, and teams

A significant portion of Hoang’s post is devoted to acknowledging those who helped shape the product in its early stages. “Hundreds of you gave feedback, pushed us, challenged us, made us better,” he writes, referring to educators, students, and professionals who engaged with the platform.

He also credits internal teams and early backers. “To our team—you’ve worked nights, weekends, through doubt and exhaustion to build something that doesn’t just give people access to AI, but makes people better with AI. That’s everything.”

Hoang closes by reinforcing the company’s underlying purpose. “We’re not building BoodleBox to automate humans out of the picture. We’re building it to skill every learner and worker for the AI opportunities that are emerging right now—opportunities that require human judgment, human creativity, human excellence amplified by AI.”