Education group Pearson said on September 29, 2026 that it had agreed to acquire Workera, a Palo Alto, California startup that measures employees' skills with AI-driven assessments. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Workera will become part of Pearson's Enterprise Learning & Skills business once the deal completes, which Pearson expects to happen in the second half of 2026, subject to customary closing conditions and any required regulatory filings or approvals.
Co-founder and chief executive Kian Katanforoosh will join the leadership team of the Enterprise Learning & Skills unit after completion. Pearson said Workera has about 60 employees.
What Workera built
Workera, founded in 2019, sells what it calls a skills intelligence platform. It combines agentic AI with psychometrics and adaptive testing, asking people to work through scenarios and simulations tied to their specific job rather than answer generic quiz questions.
Employers use the results to see what their workforce can do, including how fluent staff are with AI, to point people toward specific training, and then to check whether their skills actually improved. Pearson said companies also use the data for hiring, internal moves and workforce planning.
Pearson named ServiceNow, Accenture and the United States Space Force among Workera's enterprise and government customers. Workera's own fact sheet also lists work with the U.S. Marine Corps and its selection as a skills intelligence partner for Accenture LearnVantage.
The approach is meant to replace one-off certification with repeated measurement: a worker is assessed, sent to targeted learning, then assessed again so the employer can see whether proficiency changed. Pearson's announcement described that cycle of measuring, training and re-checking as central to the product.
“In the era of AI, an organization's ability to assess and develop skills will be key.”
Why Pearson is buying
Pearson presented the deal as a way to add adaptive assessment and skills data to what it sells to employers, at a time when companies are retraining staff for work that AI is changing. It said it plans to apply Workera's technology to AI fluency, workforce development and skills verification.
Pearson described Workera as a way to measure workforce capability continuously, rather than at a single point in time, and to link those measurements to targeted learning.
“In the era of AI, an organization's ability to assess and develop skills will be key,” said Vishaal Gupta, president of Enterprise Learning & Skills at Pearson. Katanforoosh said in the announcement that Pearson had helped people learn and grow around the world for generations.
Gupta also said, in remarks reported by EdTech Innovation Hub, that Workera had developed a new way to keep measuring and validating what a workforce can do. Pearson linked the purchase to rising demand from employers that are reorganising jobs and training around AI and want evidence that the training is working.
The founders and the funding
Katanforoosh founded Workera, and the company's fact sheet lists AI researcher Andrew Ng, managing general partner of the venture studio AI Fund, as its chairman.
“We built Workera to harness AI so people can discover what they're capable of,” Katanforoosh said, according to EdTech Innovation Hub. Before the sale, the company had operated from Palo Alto since its founding in 2019.
Workera says it has raised $44.5 million in total: $5 million at seed and pre-seed, a $16 million Series A and a $23.5 million Series B. Venture Capital Journal reported in March 2023 that the Series B was led by Jump Capital, with NEA, Owl Ventures, AI Fund and Sozo Ventures taking part. The fact sheet names AI Fund, AIX Ventures, IQT, Jump Capital, NEA, Owl Ventures and Plug and Play as investors.
Neither company said how much Pearson is paying, and there was no valuation in the announcement.
What happens to customers
Pearson did not announce changes to Workera's product or pricing. The startup's platform will sit within the Enterprise Learning & Skills business, which sells Pearson's workforce learning products to companies and governments.
The deal had not completed at the time of the announcement. Workera's fact sheet put its headcount at more than 80, higher than the roughly 60 employees cited by Pearson; the companies did not explain the difference.
