Conceptualized by Dana Stephenson and Dave Savory for their capstone entrepreneurship project at the University of Victoria, Riipen addressed an issue that they faced personally as learners — the challenge of gaining relevant work experience, building a network of possible employers, and then demonstrating their skills to that network in order to find work that would help them start their careers. They were facing the graduation conundrum — You can’t get a job without experience, but you can’t get experience without a job. 

Since inception in 2013, Riipen has expanded its reach internationally and has developed a state of the art technology platform that caters and provides significant competitive advantages for organizations and academic institutions while staying true to their original goal of supporting learner development. Riipen has enabled over 155,000 learner experiences at 430+ post-secondary institutions in 9 countries to partake in 10.2 million hours of applied learning with more than 25,800 employers.