New Venture Fund invests in EmpowerTheUser
Dublin-based cloud simulation platform provider, EmpowerTheUser, is our fourth investment from the New Venture Fund. Their platform enables organisations to drastically reduce the costs of delivering immersive, job-relevant and data-driven learning and assessment experiences.

EmpowerTheUser was founded in 2010 and also has offices in New York and Boston. It partners with global organisations, such as Morgan Stanley, PwC and BNY Mellon, to deliver simulations for training and assessing workplace skills and behaviours. EmpowerTheUser’s multi-award-winning platform enables organisations to drastically reduce the costs of delivering immersive, job-relevant and data-driven learning and assessment experiences.
The EmpowerTheUserTM platform enables talent-driven organisations to:
- Develop simulations: rapid collaborative building that is 350+% quicker than industry benchmarks (Chapman Alliance)
- Deliver plug-n-play delivery, which is proven to reduce learning time by up to 300%
- Analyse: ‘big data’ on employees’ learning provides new actionable insights to shape future learning and development on their skills and behaviors, and gap analysis
Commenting on the investment, John Yates, New Ventures Director, City & Guilds Group said: ‘We set up the New Venture Fund to support technology-driven companies with the potential to make a significant impact in skills and workforce development. Work-based simulations have been around for a good while, and are known to be effective – but they are expensive to create and until now the insights they deliver have been hard to standardise. What makes EmpowerTheUser different is that they put employer learning and development in the driving seat, allowing them to rapidly author, deliver and analyse employees’ skills and behaviours, and at scale. This collaboration is not only about supporting ETU with growth funding – it’s also about what we will learn together, about how scalable simulations help companies and their employees achieve impact as they develop their skills. We are really excited about the road ahead and to start working with the team.’
Declan Dagger, CEO and Founder of EmpowerTheUser commented: ‘This investment represents another significant milestone in ETU’s growth trajectory. We are on a mission to transform the way skills and behaviours, assessment and training is achieved. We’re really excited to be teaming up with the City & Guilds Group as we share a similar vision for the future of the assessment and training markets. Working together we can realise that vision on a truly global scale.’