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Our background

The Edplay founders' story

Viktor Potapov and Thomas Bellamy. One was sent away to school at 14, the other started on a factory floor at 18. They met through a single LinkedIn message and have spent more than seven years building companies together: one that worked, one that didn't, and the one everything was leading to.

7+ years

building companies together

1

bootstrapped exit (Sibme, 2024)

$5M

total sales at My Learning Hub

$420K

Edplay contracts in 5 months

The founders

One builds, one sells

Viktor Potapov

Co-founder & CEO · Austin, Texas

victor@edplay.ai

Twelve years building and selling workforce training software, from a bootstrapped US exit to leading Edplay's product, positioning and fundraising.

Product directionUS market entryFundraisingPositioning and focusStrategic partnershipsLeading through crisis

Why Edplay

Content creation was never the real bottleneck. Knowing what to teach, and proving it worked, is.

  • Knowing what to teach. Companies can't see which skills each person is missing.
  • Trusting what is taught. Every claim needs to trace back to an approved source.
  • Proving it worked. Completion rates say nothing about whether a worker can do the job.

Thomas Bellamy

Co-founder & CRO · Austin, Texas

thomas@edplay.ai

Fourth-time founder and the revenue engine behind every company he has built, from a bootstrapped exit to leading every Edplay deal personally.

Building sales teamsFounder-led enterprise salesGo-to-market strategyInvestor pitchingCustomer-led productPivoting on market evidence

Why Edplay

On the factory floor, then selling to training teams, he kept meeting the same three problems. So did his father, a manufacturing expert.

  • Knowledge leaves the business. Know-how lives in experienced people's heads and leaves with them.
  • Capturing it is hard. Experts lack the time and design skills to document what they know.
  • Captured knowledge goes unused. SOPs go unread and generic AI content can't be trusted.

The story

Seven years, three companies

  1. Chapter 1 · 2004 to 2014

    Two different starts

    Viktor was 14 when his parents sent him to England, alone, to boarding school at Bromsgrove. With no one to fall back on, he learned early to fix things himself. At Queen Mary, University of London, a professor mentioned a problem he couldn't solve. Viktor built the first version of a solution, and without quite meaning to, he had started a company.

    Thomas started on the factory floor. From 18 to 20 he was a machine operator at CooperVision, running contact lens production lines on shift. At 20 he left with no plan and no money and spent three years working his way through Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand. Back at 23, he joined a sales company that ran like a university: hire fast, fire fast. Two years there taught him how to sell.

  2. Chapter 2 · 2018

    One message

    Viktor had a product but no one to sell it, and wanted someone who could build a sales engine from nothing. A LinkedIn message led to a single conversation with Thomas. Thomas kept coming back, kept delivering. The job became a partnership, and the partnership became a co-founding: Viktor on product, Thomas on revenue.

    “We sat down for what was supposed to be one conversation. He just kept showing up.”

  3. Chapter 3 · 2018 to 2024

    Building with nothing

    My Learning Hub had no investors and no network. Every client was won by hand. It grew to 60 enterprise clients and 100,000+ users across the US, UK, Europe, the Middle East and South Africa: $1M ARR and $5M in total sales, including a single $500K deal in South Africa. Through Covid they kept the product shipping and every client served, and learned they could rely on each other completely.

  4. Chapter 4 · 2022 to 2023

    The one that didn't work

    HubForce showed sales teams who was reading a business case and where a deal was going cold. A good idea, too early: before generative AI, tailoring content per prospect took too long, and they shut it down. The lesson stayed: people don't need more content. They need the right content, at the moment they need it, without the manual work.

  5. Chapter 5 · 2024 to 2025

    Letting go well

    In 2024 My Learning Hub was acquired by Sibme in Houston. They stayed for a two-year handover and honoured every commitment. An investor in the acquirer watched how they handled it, and became Edplay's first backer.

    Meanwhile Thomas built Send Smart (AI SDR growth operations, 20 clients in year one) and both kept running into the same gap: the knowledge that keeps a business running lives in a few people's heads, and rarely reaches the workforce in a form they can use.

  6. Chapter 6 · May 2026

    The queue

    Edplay was founded in January 2026. At its first trade show a queue formed three people deep and didn't go away. Sixty to seventy demos were booked at a single event. The people waiting were worried about knowledge retiring with experienced staff, frontline help when something goes wrong, and proving who can actually do the job. This wasn't a content problem. It was a workforce problem.

    “The same problem, showing up everywhere we looked.”

  7. Chapter 7 · 2026

    Trust, not speed

    Bigger customers asked whether they could trust what the AI produced, so Edplay now checks every claim against the company's own sources. Then they asked which people were missing which skills, on which machine, and Edplay became workforce intelligence: find the gaps, capture expert knowledge, deliver verified training at the machine, retest until each gap closes.

    Within five months of first sales: 17 enterprise clients and $420K in contract value, every deal founder-led.

  8. Chapter 8 · Today

    Still in the room together

    Over five weeks in Texas they took more than twenty investor and partner meetings, sharpening the story after every one. After more than seven years and three companies, one builds, one sells, and they still finish each other's arguments.

Track record

The companies behind Edplay

Edplay

2026 to present

Workforce intelligence for manufacturing. 17 enterprise clients incl. Oil States, Sherwin-Williams, Mitutoyo; trials with Orbia, CooperVision and Johnson & Johnson. Delaware corporation, based in Austin.

Send Smart

2024 to present · Thomas

AI SDR growth operations for sales leaders and founders. 20 clients in year one.

HubForce

2022 to 2023

Sales enablement with deal visibility. Too early for its market; the lesson behind Edplay.

My Learning Hub

2018 to 2024 · exited

Bootstrapped workforce training software. $1M ARR, $5M total sales, 60 enterprise clients. Acquired by Sibme.

A plant where know-how doesn't retire with its people. Where every operator can learn the job at the machine, from the experts who know it best. And where managers can see, and prove, who can do what.

Edplay is the business every one of those years was pointing to.