Bryan has spent the majority of his career in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, working as an Economic Advisor on projects sponsored by EU, USAID, DFID, IMF, and the World Bank. His expertise lies in the Economic-Technology sector, where he has provided guidance in establishing Centralised Business Registration, Competition Commissions, ICT initiatives, Supply Chain Management, and Economic Process Management.
With nearly two decades of experience, he has successfully managed projects worth more than 50 million USD, including Competitiveness Programs, Regulatory Reform, Privatisation, EGAT, Commercial Law, and World Bank Index projects.
He has served as the CEO of a training company in Latin America, which he exited, and one in the US, specializing in the consulting arm of the Energy market.
Natalie is an experienced entrepreneur across Health, FinTech, AgriTech, and EdTech with two decades of leading and scaling organizations across Africa. She earned her MBA focused on social entrepreneurship from Saïd Business School at Oxford University.
She has served as a mentor for 25+ companies through more than a half dozen accelerators, is an angel investor and Director of a Ugandan e-commerce company, and is an advisor and shareholder in a South African-based AgriTech company. Natalie was selected as one of the Top 100 Women in Fintech by LATTICE80.
Natalie is the co-founder of XRGlobal and was selected as both a She Loves Tech Africa finalist and a Women in Web3 nominee for the WOMEN IN TECH®- Global Movement AFRICA Awards in 2023. She was also nominated as FOUNDER OF THE YEAR in South Africa for the Southern Africa Startup Awards 2024.
Bryan brought VR to the training company where he was Vice President in the US. He observed a dramatic increase in knowledge retention and a decrease in seat time with VR compared to typical training methods. He wanted to bring this innovation to emerging markets, where he felt it would have an even greater impact.
Natalie spent two decades working in the Health, FinTech, and AgriTech sectors across Asia and then Africa. She repeatedly encountered the same pain points with field training: low retention rates, time challenges of trainees, lack of consistency in teaching, and challenges in gathering data on learning and uptake, among others.
Bryan and Natalie met at the African Agri Investment Indaba in 2019 when Natalie was running an AgriTech company. Bryan introduced her to VR and explained how it could solve these challenges and more.
They joined forces and undertook a study with USAID Feed the Future (FTF) in Rwanda, examining the efficacy of their existing classroom training where agro dealers were brought from all over the country for an instructor-led PowerPoint training.
When they took a control group of agro dealers through the traditional 3-4 hour classroom learning, they observed a 5% increase in knowledge from baseline. They then took another group of agro dealers and put them through a 30-minute VR module built using the same content. Those agro dealers experienced a 45% increase in knowledge retention.
It all grew from there.
