Welcome to our Featured Founder series, where you’ll meet startup founders from Florida who are building and scaling their ventures to solve some of the world’s greatest challenges. We interviewed Riley Walker of ryco.io, a company that offers a comprehensive one-stop hub designed to improve the content development process and enhance the teaching experience.

Please provide a brief one-liner about your company.

Ryco.io offers a comprehensive one-stop hub designed to improve the content development process, and enhance the teaching experience.

What were you doing previously, and what inspired you to launch your company?

I was inspired to launch ryco.io because of my sister—while I thrived in school, my sister, a gifted artist, struggled in a one-size-fits-all system. That contrast inspired me to make personalized learning accessible for every student.

Before founding ryco.io, I worked at the crossroads of education and publishing—first as a freelance writer creating textbooks, teacher guides, and assessments, then as the founder of a curriculum development company serving major publishers and schools. I later joined a technology portfolio company, broadening my experience across industries.

When the pandemic hit, my education network urgently needed help delivering remote learning. I stepped in to solve that challenge, and ryco.io was born.

What pain point is your company solving? What gets you excited to go to work every day?

At ryco.io, we’re helping organizations identify the gap between learning for all and learning for each. One-size-fits-all is outdated. The status quo must change, and now we have the technology to do it. Every school, business, and organization has unique needs, yet most curriculum and training materials are still built for the masses. That’s where we come in.

What excites me every day is that we’re not just creating content—we’re designing truly personalized learning experiences. Our team is made up of instructional designers, former educators, and technologists who deeply understand pedagogy, andragogy, and the science of engagement. By combining that expertise with AI, we can craft immersive, tailored learning materials in a fraction of the time it traditionally takes.

The thrill comes from knowing we’re helping learners connect with material in ways that actually stick—transforming learning from a box to check into an experience that drives real growth and results.

Name the biggest challenge you faced in the process of launching the company. How did you overcome it?

The biggest challenge in launching ryco.io has been helping schools—especially in the public sector—break away from the traditional education model. Our current system was designed over a century ago during the Industrial Revolution to produce workers for factory-style jobs, with rigid schedules, standardized instruction, and an emphasis on compliance.

Today, the world—and our workforce—demands something entirely different: creativity, critical thinking, digital literacy, collaboration, and adaptability. The gap between this outdated model and modern needs is massive, and convincing institutions to embrace more flexible, personalized, skills-based learning has been both our greatest challenge and our greatest motivation.

Where do you see your company headed next?

At ryco.io, we see the future of learning as on-demand, deeply personalized, and seamlessly integrated into the flow of life and work. Our team is building agentic solutions that go far beyond traditional curriculum design—they enable organizations to instantly create immersive and adaptive training experiences that meet learners exactly where they are.

Picture this: a school requests a gamified simulation to train students as automation integration specialists, and within moments, a fully interactive learning journey is generated. Or imagine a corporation onboarding hundreds of employees, each receiving a uniquely tailored experience that adapts to their backgrounds, skills, and learning styles—so training isn’t just “one-size-fits-all,” but precisely aligned to how each person learns best while reinforcing the company’s core practices.

This vision isn’t just about convenience—it’s about scale and necessity. By 2030, AI is expected to create more than 170 million new jobs, many of which don’t exist today. Entire industries will need new forms of training, and the speed and scale of this demand will eclipse anything we’ve seen before in education and workforce development. That’s where ryco.io comes in.

We’re building a system of specialized AI agents—experts in everything from instructional design to gamification, from augmented and virtual reality to subject matter expertise. These agents collaborate to generate the exact type of learning experience needed, whether it’s a VR safety training, an AR-enhanced science lab, or a digital lesson series designed to build leadership skills. With just a simple prompt and a click, organizations will have the ability to unlock world-class, highly personalized learning at unprecedented speed.

Ultimately, ryco.io is not just about making education more efficient—it’s about shaping how people prepare for the jobs, challenges, and opportunities of the future. We believe learning should be as dynamic and adaptive as the world around us, and we’re committed to building the tools that make that possible. At ryco.io, we’re not just building technology—we’re building the infrastructure for the future of human potential.

Give us a tactical piece of advice that you’d share with another founder just starting out.

“In business, every hand you help has the power to unlock a door you didn’t know was there.”