How a message to a stranger became Coursebox

Coursebox started with one message to a stranger on the internet, in April 2022. Today it's an agentic AI platform used by more than 150,000 training providers in 180 countries!

None of that existed when I sent that message.
Today, it's more than 300,000 courses generated, in dozens of languages.

I messaged a random guy on the internet

In April 2022, I listed a profile on Y Combinator's co-founder matching platform because I wanted to build something with the potential for global impact. That's how I found Travis Clapp, who had spent more than 10 years in instructional design and education. I sent him a message to see if we should try building something together.

Travis had carried an idea for years: use AI to assist instructional design. When he first described it, my honest reaction was that it did not sound like a good idea. The AI tools I'd tried at the time never seemed that useful.

Then ChatGPT happened

ChatGPT landed in late 2022, and everything changed. Using AI to assist instructional design had felt close to impossible a few months earlier; overnight, it felt realistic. We had been struggling to get any traction with a simple course creator, so we pivoted hard toward AI course generation. It took months of building before that version of the product was ready, but when it shipped, the difference was immediate. Our growth took a real turn from there.

20,000 signups, and I still had a day job

By February 2024, six months after the AI course creator launched, Coursebox had more than 20,000 signups, 200 paying customers, and was ranked #1 on Google for "AI course creator." Signups were arriving every day from organic search, and sales followed.

For a while we'd both worked on it part-time. I put in less time at first because I had a full-time job to pay my bills, so Coursebox happened in the evenings and on weekends. Once the sales started coming in, I decided this could become something long-term, and I left my full-time job to throw myself at it completely. That's a hard position for any founder, juggling the work while paying your own way. I was fortunate to have saved enough to last a few months, and I picked up part-time freelancing to bridge the gap while we weren't yet able to pay ourselves a salary.

An accelerator, and our first CTO

In May 2024 we got into Plus Eight, a well-regarded accelerator in Perth. Up to that point I'd been covering my own runway with freelance work, and every hour that went into freelancing was an hour that didn't go into Coursebox. The investment that came with the program ended that trade-off. We hired our founding CTO, Toni Arrebola, and for the first time the product had someone whose whole job was its foundations rather than whatever we could get to on a weekend.

In August 2025 we closed a seed round with a local venture fund, Purpose Ventures, which let us expand the team further. Today we're a team of 11+ people, building on years of learning-management history already in our codebase, which is why Coursebox works as both an authoring tool and an LMS.

What Coursebox does now

Coursebox is now an all-in-one agentic AI course creator for building and managing training. You tell it who the learner is, how long the course should be, and the kind of content you have in mind, and it generates an interactive course with visuals, video, and scenario-based learning that matches what you asked for, personalised to the learner to lift engagement.

An AI tutor trained on the whole course can chat back and forth with each learner. Learners can switch into voice mode and listen to a course like a podcast, then complete their assessments by speaking rather than typing.

You can ask Coursebox in chat to edit a course or add content, and it makes the change for you. You can white-label the entire platform so the experience is fully branded for your learners, and integrate with the learning management system you already use, so switching systems is optional, not required.

Candice, a mental health care professional who uses Coursebox, told us it "helps me quickly construct courses that previously took months and even years to build." That's the bar. So we benchmark our output, run our own testing, and put courses in front of real users, then keep improving the engine on what comes back.

Darren Lewis, at the Institute for Economics and Peace, has been pitched hundreds of learning management systems. He says Coursebox is "by far the best I have ever seen. Plus, it is way more affordable."

We have four values. Move fast, change the world, focus on always learning and think globally. Most of the world doesn't speak English as a first language. Every software company knows that, and almost all of them still build in English and translate later, if they get to it at all. We decided early that language wasn't a feature to bolt on once we had traction. Today 40% of courses are created in languages other than English, our website runs in 11 languages, and the platform supports more than 30 locales after we added 17 more in June 2026.

What we're building next

We see Coursebox as a foundational platform for the next wave of educational technology: personalised AI learning paths, interactive simulations and practice, AI tutors available the moment a question comes up, multilingual course generation, and training powered by real-time feedback.

It still feels like we've only just started.