Raphael Thys
Dr Chibeza Agley is CEO of Obrizum, which is primed to capitalise on the growing demand in corporate learning market. Photo: Obrizum
University of Cambridge PhD scientist Dr Chibeza Agley is co-founder and CEO of Obrizum, which uses AI-powered ‘adaptive learning’ to improve knowledge sharing across corporates and public sector organisations.
The corporate training market is expected to grow to $475bn by 2027 as companies recognise the continual need to keep their workforce relevant and productive. Beza led a £9.5m Series A funding round this year as Obrizum sets its sights on huge growth ambitions.
At Brunel University I was doing exercise physiology, getting excited about science and tech and wanted to go all in. I applied to King’s College, wrote a technical application and the interview was led by professor Stephen Harridge.
I got my first significant position to go onto the Masters programme which only accepted 12 people at the time. It was an intensive 12-month course. I got to go to the MoD, on underwater medicine programmes and flight courses at military bases, all things which would probably not be possible now.
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I was intent on being the very best and Steve was an inspirational character, with his focus on adult muscle stem cells and being a world leader in his field. He had a small lab at King’s College with a reputation built through science and the relationships he generated; all this without the resources generated by some of the other mega labs.
I got to see this figurehead close up and he encouraged me to do a PhD. We put together a funding bid and we got a four-year project together on detailed molecular biology, skills I had to learn fast as I was the only one left in the lab.
Chibeza Agley credits professor Stephen Harridge, pictured, for giving him grounding in leadership. Photo: supplied
But Steve, who wanted to take on the world, instilled confidence in me that it was all possible and was super supportive. It ended up being impactful work — along with plenty of nights sleeping on the lab floor — and being published in some of the world’s best journals.
Once you’ve seen that you can take on a challenge that seems impossible, but then ultimately achieve the goals, it undoubtedly changes you as a person. We achieved things that other world-class labs weren’t able to crack. The lesson here is that it isn’t about money and resources but if we, as human beings, dig deep there is a lot already out there at our disposal. Yet you need good leadership to unlock that.
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I love inventing and understanding mechanisms and a few years later in Cambridge I saw some disruptive movements, not least with genetic engineering and the gene editing tools used to cure previously incurable diseases. You could fix, edit and effectively change the world as humans took control of their own code.
I knew for a fact that this was going to revolutionise medicine. But in order for this tech to change society it was going to take 10 years. Not because we couldn’t do it but the knowledge wasn’t going to the right people at the right time.
I got interested in the transfer of information to the right people and together with Obrizum’s co-founders we curated this base of knowledge we had and went to speak to business, drug companies, industry professionals, researchers and academics.
Obrizum was founded by a trio of PhD-trained Cambridge scientists, doctors Chibeza Agley, centre, Sarra Achouri and Juergen Fink. Photo: Obrizum
We saw immediate value. We put £500 in each and in the first couple of years we started turning over serious money. But the way we were going around, getting on planes and manually curating the world’s knowledge wasn’t going to scale in a way to deliver impact.
The only way of replicating what we were doing on a human scale to take globally was through artificial intelligence. We never took any money out of the business — ten times more than we ever made as scientists — and used it to hire engineers and developers to build a personalised platform for better measurement.
Every company in the world has to have people who know what they are doing. But the corporate training market had been a relatively undisrupted industry. Previously within corporates it had been a cut and paste of university style learning in miniature.
Today there is so much information to take in and so you have to create a more agile way of getting to the right knowledge at the right time and tailoring the result.
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And in Obrizum’s world, we measure everything efficiently and get quantifiable data to prove things are going in the direction you want. It's a kind of corporate learning plus. Anywhere you are transferring information and want to measure the outcome, anywhere where training is important for a valuable result is where you’ll find Obrizum.
The way Steve ran the lab 15 years ago, there was no question he was the leader but he didn’t have to be over assertive. It was the quality of the trusted relationships he developed with everyone he interacted with that gave him his seniority and authority, that potentially other forms of leadership wouldn’t touch.
Steve was just a stable, calm presence like a spirit level. It gave everyone else confidence and is an important quality of leadership that I try to borrow today.
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