In response to shortages of nurses, paramedics, and other healthcare professionals, governments are increasing intakes in post-secondary healthcare programs. As a result, demand for student placements is growing faster than supply. An increasingly popular response to this problem is virtual work-integrated learning (WIL), which is adding momentum to a medical-simulation software market projected to double to $460 million by 2030.
This Analyst Report outlines an investment thesis for Affinity Learning, a Canadian platform for building branched clinical-simulation scenarios. Written for prospective investors from the perspective of an instructional designer and technologist, it considers both the value of the product and the viability of the company making it.
The picture is mixed. There is real demand, adoption is easy, and the product has unique features, BUT there is also low revenue, regulatory risk, and well-established competitor.
So what’s the recommendation? Should you invest or not?
Read the Analyst Report to find out.
Hi John,
I really enjoyed your EVA, particularly how clearly you distinguished between Affinity Learning’s educational value and its viability as an investment. Your analysis on pricing, customer concentration, founder dependency, and compliance readiness made your “Conditional Yes” recommendation very well supported rather than giving it to be simply cautious. I also thought your comparison with Storyline was very effective as you moved beyond product features and considered vendor durability, data custody, security, and institutional procurement. The idea that compliance could eventually become a competitive moat was especially interesting.
One area I found myself wondering about was your recommendation to diversity beyond healthcare. Affinity Learning’s specialization in clinical simulation appears to be one of its strongest differentiators, especially in comparison to more general authoring platforms (e.g. Storyline). Do you think expanding into other industries would dilute some of that competitive advantage to place Affinity Learning with more direct competition with larger and more established platforms? I wonder also if there could be greater value in deepening its position within healthcare before pursuing a broader market.
Overall, this is a very strong example of an EVA that considers both the value of the technology but also its long-term viability as a venture. I thought the staged investment recommendation was effective as it identifies what would need to change before an investor should commit.
I’ve also really enjoyed learning from your perspective this semester. Getting to work alongside you with our OER gave me some insight and understanding of the post-secondary side of education, which I don’t have much experience with. I can really see that perspective clearly coming through within this analysis!
Hi Sam – thank you for the thoughtful feedback.
Using Affinity Learning I found it was already 90% of the way to being usable for work-integrate learning simulations for other domains like business. In particular, their AI patients are better than anything else I’ve used. To adapt that to simulate customers and clients would really just be a shift in framing rather than a change in functionality.
Given i) the increasing demand for simulated WIL opportunities, and ii) the fact that investors will want to see a clear path to customer growth and diversification before committing significant capital, I think Affinity Learning broadening their scope would be inevitable if they sought funding. From my professional perspective I’d recommend it because instructional design teams generally work across all the academic schools in a PSE institution. The broader the range of disciplines they support, the more possible points of entry an ID team has to their product and the more reasons they have to argue for paying for it.
I enjoyed working with you as well. Best of luck in the rest of the program.