Arist

Backed by Y Combinator, Acadian Ventures, and Soma Capital, Arist is a text message learning platform helping Fortune 500 companies and large organizations — including DuPont, GE, and the State of California — create, deploy, and assess text message courses.

Organizations usually use a suite of video-based courses, in-person sessions, and microlearning apps to train employees. These solutions are passive, have low engagement, are expensive, and are difficult to quickly build and adapt. With Arist courses—an image/GIF, a 1200-character (two screen lengths) concept or case study explanation, and an exercise or assessment, are texted to the user over 5-30 days.

Companies can instantly deliver corporate training that actively engages learners, is inexpensive to deploy, and can be created in just a few hours (compared to weeks). Thanks to the short-form content, Arist courses have a completion and satisfaction rates of over 90%, compared to 5% for video courses.

You might be wondering, what’s a “text message course”? It’s series of texts, images/GIFs, and interactive exercises/questions delivered over 5 to 30 days via SMS or WhatsApp. Backed by research from Stanford and Harvard, text message courses see about 10x the completion and satisfaction rates of other learning mediums.

In fact, they view text message courses as a brand-new content medium, with a variety of impactful use cases. The company’s long-term vision is to deliver critical knowledge and training to anyone in the world, regardless of traditional learning barriers, one text message at a time. For this and more, Arist is the Cool Tool Award Winner (2021) for “Best Corporate Training Solution” as part of The EdTech Awards from EdTech Digest. Learn more.