AirTree writes one of its biggest cheques for one that got away

"Andrew and his team were high performers when we met them, but what we've seen over the years is them evolve the model into a content play, which is very strategic and plugs into the learning management system partnership models and surfaces learning content wherever you want it."

The Queensland-based start-up was founded in 2015 by Andrew Barnes, Chris Eigeland, Chris Hood and Vu Tran and is a marketplace for educational courses ranging from first aid to coding and leadership skills.

Its marketplace is used by the likes of Delta Air Lines, TikTok, Hays and the University of New South Wales.

When Mr Blair was introduced to the business it had just 20 courses on offer, but now there are more than 100,000, including from Harvard, Microsoft and Blinkist.

The business has further grown during the pandemic and accelerated its integration with Microsoft Teams in order to respond to the new at-home working and learning environment.

When the founders started the company, 90 per cent of its revenue was generated within Australia, but it is gaining traction in the US and the UK, with the US its largest region last quarter.

"Now we can demonstrate there's a bigger market and a bigger appetite for it," Dr Barnes said.

"Corporate education is a massive market ... For us, we're doubling year on year globally and I can see the US continuing on its 3-times growth trajectory for a bit longer. But the overall goal of the management team is to double year on year."

Through one of Go1's most recent innovations – portable learning profiles – the platform is now positioning itself as a Spotify for short courses and offering subscription access to corporate education.

The profiles consolidate a person's learning across multiple workplaces, or individually.

Next, Go1 intends to help people use their profiles to find employment opportunities, thanks to its integration with Seek (which is also an investor).

"We decided this was the right thing to do when we saw the difficulty people had sharing education history across employers, or even when they wanted to volunteer at other organisations," Dr Barnes said.

"[Now] we're interested in working out what type of learning individuals are interested in [beyond what's required for their job]. Most people will say it's been five, six or even more years ago that they did a short course, but people learn online a lot more frequently."

AirTree, which has also backed the likes of A Cloud Guru, Athena and Canva, sees Go1 as a "conviction bet", according to Mr Blair.

"There's a real opportunity to pioneer new ways of thinking about learning," he said.

"Snackable, portable learning is only possible now though the huge content layer that Go1 has built and the layers of personalisation on top of that.

"The third thing is the huge macro tailwinds behind all of this. "