The corporate training market has a blind spot. While enterprise platforms chase Fortune 500 contracts and AI vendors promise fully automated learning, millions of employees at smaller companies struggle with outdated PowerPoints and YouTube tutorials. Recently, we sat down with Chip Reaves, president and founder of Bigger Brains, whose company is quietly building something in this overlooked space.
The numbers tell an interesting story. Bigger Brains just set all kinds of records in Q2. 2025 is doing way better than expected, with about 22% growth this year. But what caught our attention wasn’t just the growth — it was where it’s coming from. While most training companies are either racing to automate everything with AI or fighting for enterprise deals, Bigger Brains has carved out a unique position by focusing on quality over rapid scale and serving markets others ignore.
The Corporate Training Landscape: A Market in Transition
The fundamental challenge for corporate learning is clear: how to deliver engaging, effective learning at scale without sacrificing quality. The pressure points are familiar to any L&D professional—shrinking budgets, distributed workforces, rapidly changing skill requirements, and the constant demand to prove ROI.
Bigger Brains has positioned itself uniquely in this ecosystem, creating premium content that is highly effective. However, the competitive landscape for content creation itself is evolving rapidly, with several distinct approaches vying for market share.
Synthesia represents the cutting edge of AI-powered video creation, offering a radically different approach to training content using AI avatars and text-to-speech technology to produce training videos fast at a fraction of the cost compared to traditional methods. Yet Synthesia’s AI-first approach has limitations. The lack of human connection and potential uncanny valley effect remain significant barriers for many organizations.
Infopro Learning takes an enterprise consulting approach, positioning itself as a comprehensive workforce transformation partner. Infopro’s strength lies in comprehensive enterprise engagements, but their consultative model and pricing typically target Fortune 500 companies rather than the SMB market, where Bigger Brains has found success.
CommLab India has carved out a niche as the speed leader in eLearning development, clocking 30000+ minutes of rapid development for clients across the US and Europe in the last two years alone. While CommLab excels at rapid conversion and development, their focus on speed can come at the expense of the premium, carefully crafted learning experiences that define Bigger Brains’ approach.
Udemy for Business operates on a marketplace model, aggregating content from thousands of individual instructors. Udemy offers flexible, self-paced learning with diverse content for various skills. Some courses can be hit or miss in terms of quality, and not every instructor is equally engaging. The marketplace model provides breadth but struggles with consistency—a critical issue for organizations seeking standardized training experiences across their workforce.
Coursera for Business leverages university partnerships to deliver academically-backed content with a focus on professional certificates and degree-pathway content. While Coursera’s academic pedigree appeals to certain organizations, some users have expressed concerns about the platform’s user interface, finding it clunky and difficult to navigate, and the formal academic approach may not resonate with all corporate learners.
The Two-Teacher Advantage: Why Format Still Matters
In an era of AI-generated content and automated course creation, Bigger Brains has doubled down on human connection. “We very intentionally created a style where we have two people on camera, it’s more conversational. There’s a lot more interaction and back and forth, kind of replicates a lot of the classroom environment,” shared Reaves.
This “Teacher/Learner” format addresses several critical learning challenges:
- Cognitive Engagement: The conversational dynamic maintains attention better than single-narrator formats.
- Practical Application: Real-time Q&A demonstrates how concepts apply in actual work scenarios.
- Reduced Cognitive Load: Breaking complex topics into dialogue makes them more digestible.
- Psychological Safety: Seeing someone else ask questions normalizes the learning process.
The production complexity this creates is significant. It’s a lot more complex to create, and it’s a lot more complex to produce. Yet this investment in quality has become their competitive advantage. While competitors race to automate, Bigger Brains maintains a fixed limit in new teacher contracts where 5% of the content is the max that we can do that’s AI-generated.
The Ideal Customer: Serving the Underserved
Bigger Brains’ customer segmentation reveals a sophisticated understanding of market gaps:
IT Service Providers (MSPs/CSPs) Reaves states, “… my background’s in the IT consulting space, and so we got started as a platform for IT consultants to use to offer training to their end users.” This market remains crucial, representing about 18% of their business. Benefits for this segment include white-labeled training they can resell to clients, content that complements their technical services, ability to serve small business clients typically ignored by enterprise LMS vendors and integration with MSP platforms like CloudRadial and DeskDirector.
Small and Mid-Sized Businesses (Direct Sales) When you’re talking about doing IT support for an accounting firm with five people, that’s not a big target for an LMS company. And a lot of the LMSs are priced out of reach for that size company. For these organizations, there is no complex LMS implementation required. Pricing is accessible for smaller budgets, and content is immediately applicable to their scale. This also reduces the administrative burden.
Training Platform Partners. Their largest growth driver comes from partnerships with Cornerstone, Open Sesame, Biz Library, and Pryor Learning. These partnerships provide: premium content differentiation for platform providers, consistent quality across technology topics, regular content updates without internal production costs, and proven engagement metrics to justify content investments.
Enterprise Departments Needing Specialized Training. While not their primary focus, specific departments within larger organizations can also benefit from technology training beyond generic offerings in a consistent format across all courses. Bigger Brains offers a practical, hands-on approach to software training with regular updates as software evolves.
Organizations in Transition Companies modernizing their training approach find particular value in having a bridge between traditional classroom and full digital transformation with quality content while building internal L&D capabilities. This offers flexibility to scale up or down as needs evolve with proven content to demonstrate training ROI.
Strategic Positioning: The Premium Middle Market
Bigger Brains occupies a unique position in the corporate training ecosystem. They’re neither the cheapest nor the most comprehensive, but they may be the most thoughtful about their specific value proposition.
Their strategy reveals several key insights:
Quality as Differentiator: In a market racing toward commoditization, their insistence on the two-teacher format and limited AI usage positions them as the premium option for organizations that value engagement over efficiency.
Channel Diversification: By maintaining strong positions in both the IT service provider channel and training platform partnerships while carefully growing direct sales, they’ve created multiple revenue streams without channel conflict. I’ve made it very clear to the team, we have to always be a good partner first. We can never be in a position where any of our partners feels like they can’t trust us.
Market Timing: The explosion in AI-generated content may actually strengthen their position. As feedback from a lot of our distribution partners who have been pushing back on anything AI-generated. They say they’re getting a lot of negative comments from customers who don’t want AI-generated audio, don’t want AI-generated video.
Operational Excellence: Their investment in better tracking and licensing for our courses led to significant catch-up payments last year, demonstrating how operational improvements can drive revenue growth.
Market Trajectory: Automation and Efficiency
The path ahead presents both opportunities and obstacles. The biggest challenge is always the production pipeline, because the format is so time-consuming. This production constraint limits scalability but also protects their quality advantage.
The market dynamics suggest several strategic considerations:
- AI Integration: While maintaining their human-first approach, selective AI adoption for curriculum development and production efficiency could accelerate content creation without compromising quality.
- Market Expansion: 80% of channel partners in a recent poll said they bundle IT and connectivity solutions for customers at least some of the time, suggesting opportunities to expand within their existing IT service provider base.
- Vertical Specialization: As MSPs that do not offer these things may not be able to operate in the near future, creating specialized content for emerging MSP requirements around compliance, security, and vertical expertise could drive growth.
- Platform Evolution: Their Microsoft Teams app and LMS integrations suggest a path toward becoming more than just a content provider, potentially offering lightweight learning experience capabilities for smaller organizations.
The corporate training market continues to bifurcate between fully automated, AI-driven solutions and high-touch, premium offerings. Bigger Brains has positioned itself firmly in the premium camp while maintaining the operational efficiency to serve the middle market profitably. Their continued growth in a challenging market suggests this positioning resonates with customers tired of choosing between unaffordable enterprise solutions and low-quality alternatives.
For organizations evaluating training partners, Bigger Brains offers a compelling option —not as the cheapest or most comprehensive solution, but as one that understands that effective learning still requires human connection, consistent quality, and content designed for how people actually learn. In a market increasingly dominated by algorithms and automation, that human touch might be their greatest differentiator.
