MOONHUB: case study
A new frontier in training
Every company needs to train its staff to keep them informed, engaged and responsive. Startup MOONHUB is banking on that training one day being delivered exclusively by virtual reality headsets.
It’s certainly a sector that’s worth investing in. According to consultancy PWC estimates, the burgeoning global VC workplace training market will jump to $294bn by 2030.
MOONHUB is poised to grow its share of this lucrative market. It is already working with a number of clients who share its vision for a completely revolutionary approach to training, including major names like Just Eat, Sports Interactive and BNP Paribas – and that’s just the start.
Founded in 2016, MOONHUB is disrupting traditional training models by offering VR-powered, fully immersive training courses. The aim is to simulate real-life scenarios and make the learning environment more compelling. The benefit is the low-risk, 360-degree experience for learners and the analytical performance overview for managers.
MOONHUB believes the real-life role play situations also enable more effective knowledge transfer. As MOONHUB founder, Dami Hastrup says, “In the companies I worked in prior to MOONHUB, it felt as though training was broken. Our goal was to create something that really worked, something with real depth rather than a box ticking exercise.”
Working alongside a company’s existing Learning Management System (LMS), MOONHUB can offer a library of VR training without the need for expensive external partnerships. Its patented ‘spot and jot’ scoring technology helps companies capture vital data in real-time and feed it onto a bespoke tailored dashboard for managers to analyse. The platform can work across any sector and is easy to scale and deploy – remotely if necessary.
The benefits of VR training
This groundbreaking approach offers many benefits including verifiable ROI, time-efficient training and workforce productivity. Figures from PWC support his contention; for example, VR training can more than halve L&D costs, especially at scale while VR training can be completed in a quarter of the time of traditional L&D methods. Meanwhile, according to global consultancy giant, Accenture, VR offers the potential for a 75% retention score among your workforce compared with 5-10% seen using traditional methods.
MOONHUB’s library supports a wide range of sectors such as Diversity and Inclusion, and social care training, empowering care workers looking after Dementia patients. The D&I training has been co-curated in partnership with Róisín Wood, former CEO of Kick It Out, English football’s equality and inclusion organisation. At a time when inclusion is top of every company’s agenda, the ability to train staff to identify micro-aggressions or discrimination and to challenge and change toxic corporate cultures is crucial.
In July 2022, MOONHUB hosted a Diversity and Inclusion roundtable event at Plexal in Stratford, which discussed the adversities faced in professional environments and how future workplaces could be shaped using virtual reality training.
In healthcare, with dementia rates on the rise, more specialised care workers will be required. MOONHUB’s immersive VR training suite, ELARA, transformed Anglian Care’s staff to achieve better understanding of patients, heighten their cognitive abilities and improve care in a risk-free environment. Anglian Care COO, Charles Cross says, “The immersive technology seemed a much better way of training than e-learning courses at the same price point.”
$2.6m seed funding raised, led by global proptech, VC Pi Labs
Backing from Miles Jacobson, director of Sports Interactive
Chosen by Digital Catapult to meet the former science minister
Featured in The Times
Gearing up for expansion
The workshops and building exercises we did with Digital Catapult were very useful. We learned how to talk to VCs and were able to expand our network. DC were always willing to help, and we will definitely be following up with them.
Dami Hastrup MOONHUB founder
MOONHUB has raised $2.6m in seed funding led by global proptech, VC Pi Labs, with participation from Ada Ventures and 1818 Venture Capital. In 2020, the company received backing from Miles Jacobson, director of Sports Interactive, the firm behind the Football Manager game series.
MOONHUB’s association with Digital Catapult has been invaluable and has offered the company access to contacts it may not have otherwise found. The startup took part in Digital Catapult’s Augmentor accelerator programme in early 2021 and benefitted from a number of introductions to venture capitalists. Similarly, MOONHUB’s Chief Technology Officer Vinh Ly was recently selected to represent the Digital Catapult startup community by meeting the former Minister for Science, Research and Innovation, George Freeman during London Tech Week.
Digital Catapult supports over 250 actively fundraising startups like MOONHUB through its acceleration programme, FutureScope – and continues to work closely with the MOONHUB team as they scale.
For Hastrup, the goal is to become a household name in training. Forget the VR prefix, as the team believes that in time it won’t be needed – as all training will happen this way. The company is currently in the process of overhauling its pricing structure and is gearing itself for expansion.
Last year, figures showed that firms saw their training expenditure rise to more than £800 per employee. If you consider that at scale, VR can save companies up to 64% in learning and development spending, it would suggest that MOONHUB’s plans to turbocharge the sector will reap handsome rewards.
Visit MOONHUB’s website here.
Read about MOONHUB in The Times here.
