£10m fund for PrimeLearning.com

A Limerick-based Internet training company is raising £10 million (€12.7 million) in a private placing, which it will use to launch a major drive into the US market. The company, PrimeLearning.com, expects to list on the Nasdaq within 18 months.

PrimeLearning, which was established last year, is focusing on "soft skills" - business training such as sales and finance - rather than education. It will target blue-chip companies in the US and Britain initially, only moving to mainland Europe at a later stage of development.

Established by Mr Terry and Mrs Mary O'Brien, and currently employing 31 people in the National Technological Park in Limerick, PrimeLearning aims to recruit an additional 100 staff this year.

The £10 million tranche being raised now will be used to develop more products from its Limerick base and to employ a 50-strong sales and marketing and product support staff in the US.

The company is forecasting revenues of £3.9 million for the year ending February 28th, next year. It expects this to rise sharply to £33.6 million in 2002.

Mr O'Brien says PrimeLearning has the advantage of being one of only a handful of companies currently targeting the soft skills market using Web-based technology. This view is supported by Ms Sheila McGovern, an analyst with IDC Consultants, technology analysts.

She says it is a fairly new concept. "There is not much com petition in Europe, but a few companies in the US are offering such training," she says. Ms McGovern says IDC predicts that Web-based training will grow much faster than instructor-led training, "particularly online, Internet-delivered training, which is still very much an emerging technology".

Mr Liam Fitzgerald, a non-executive director of PrimeLearning and former managing director of Financial Courseware, Intuition Publishing, says the company aims to be a leading supplier of Internet-based learning solutions. PrimeLearning is working with large corporates and US-based universities to devise other programmes. It will create 11 different education sectors and will tailor the training programmes for each corporate's specific needs.

It has an alliance with Xerox Corporation, whereby it is licensed exclusively to create e-learning solutions based on Xerox's internal training programmes. Last October it released its first product, Prime Sales.

"Nobody is currently offering a full service solution," Mr Fitzgerald claims. He says PrimeLearning will provide the kind of training "traditionally firms used to do themselves, but do not have the time to do now".

He says the courses - which will be purely Web-based instead of distance learning using CDRoms - will be targeted at specific skills to enhance job performance. PrimeLearning was established in January 1999 with £2 million funding from British venture capital group 3i. That company will partake in the current round of fundraising which is being handled by IBI Corporate Finance. It is expected 3i will invest at least another £2 million.

Both Mr O'Brien, his wife and a number of the firm's key executives have a strong background in technology-delivered training. The couple founded Mindware Training Technologies, which provides technology-delivered training to telecoms companies. They sold the company, which now employs 70 people, to US-based Gartner Group Learning in 1996 for $2.5 million "and lots of stock options".

However, according to Mr O'Brien they walked away from these options because they considered them "handcuffs" and wanted to be free to establish another technology training company. As more funding becomes available, the make-up of the company's share structure will change. 3i currently has 27 per cent; Mr & Mrs O'Brien have 53 per cent, while employees have 20 per cent.