Backed by Y Combinator, Acadian Ventures, and Soma Capital, Arist is a text message learning platform helping Fortune 500 companies and large organizations — including DuPont, GE, and the State of California — create, deploy, and assess text message courses.

Our long-term vision is to deliver critical knowledge and training to anyone in the world, regardless of traditional learning barriers, one text message at a time.

What's a text message course?

A series of texts, images/GIFs, and interactive exercises/questions delivered over 5 to 30 days via SMS or WhatsApp. Backed by research from Stanford and Harvard, text message courses see ~10x the completion and satisfaction rates of other learning mediums.

In fact, we view text message courses as a brand-new content medium, with a variety of impactful use cases ranging from preventing misinformation to COVID-19 training in refugee camps to DEI training for startups.

Why text messages?

A majority of the world's population — including frontline employees, distributed teams, and remote audiences — has access to SMS and WhatsApp. Meanwhile, internet access is limited globally, making video courses inaccessible to over 3 billion people, including 30 million Americans.

As well, it can also take months to build a traditional workshop or video course, while text message courses can be built and deployed in a day — by one person — ensuring frictionless transfer of knowledge. Writers have to get to the point, so learners get the most valuable insights, concepts, and case studies.

The best part? 95% of people read a text within 3 minutes. As a result, we help create and deliver content employees love in a way that they will actually read and engage with. Don't take our word for it — try a text message course about text message courses here.