Press kit — UpSkillZone
Everything on this page is cleared for public use without prior approval. If you need something that isn't here — a custom quote, an interview slot, an embargoed briefing — reach the founders directly.
Press contact
Response within one business day. We answer in writing, in English, and we will say no in writing too.
§1
Copy verbatim. No prior approval needed.
50 words
UpSkillZone, Inc. is a Delaware C-corp building the outcome ledger for AI work. The platform issues cryptographically verifiable credentials for AI engineering roles and charges employers per verified hire — with a 90-day outcome-credit clause that refunds tuition if the role fails to stick.
150 words
UpSkillZone, Inc. is a 2026 Delaware C-corp building the outcome ledger for AI work. Every step of the learner path — entrance assessment, Job Twin simulation, mentor-calibrated grading, employer hire, 90-day outcome attestation — produces a signed artifact on a public ledger. Credentials are issued as W3C Verifiable Credentials in Open Badges 3.0 form, signed with Ed25519 and verifiable offline against a stable JWKS endpoint. Mentors grade against a Cohen's kappa floor of 0.7; employers pay a 12% take-rate on signed hire attestations and trigger a pro-rata refund if the 90-day outcome attestation comes back negative. The platform code is Apache-2.0. UpSkillZone competes with bootcamps and certificate mills on a single axis: every claim on the credential is bound to an artifact a third party can re-grade.
§2
Logo, wordmark, founder portraits, and platform screenshots. Use as-is; do not recolor the wordmark or composite the logo onto third-party glyphs. The Apache-2.0 grant on the platform code does not extend to these marks.
§3
Self-contained — quote in full or excerpt; both are cleared.
Mira Aguilar
Founder, Engineering
Eight years on retrieval and evaluation infrastructure at two large search companies; ran the offline eval harness gating model launches.
Mira Aguilar leads platform engineering at UpSkillZone. Before UpSkillZone she spent eight years on retrieval and evaluation infrastructure at two large search companies, most recently running the team responsible for the offline eval harness that gated their model-launch process. She has shipped production credential systems against W3C VC and Open Badges 3.0, and contributed patches to the open-source verifier libraries the platform now depends on.
At UpSkillZone she owns the modular monolith, the Ed25519 issuer-key custody story, and the JWKS endpoint that makes credentials verifiable offline. Her stated thesis is that certificate trust collapses when the underlying artifact is opaque — and that the fix is mechanical, not editorial. She holds a B.S. in computer science and writes occasionally about adversarial evaluation.
Reach: founders@upskillzone.com
Daniel Okafor
Founder, Mentor Network
A decade as staff engineer and engineering manager at three AI-first startups, hiring against role-specific evaluation rubrics.
Daniel Okafor leads the mentor network at UpSkillZone. He spent the prior decade as a staff engineer and engineering manager at three AI-first startups, hiring and onboarding ML practitioners against role-specific evaluation rubrics. That hiring-loop work convinced him that the bottleneck in AI talent supply is calibrated review, not credential volume — a view that shapes the mentor-calibration floor UpSkillZone enforces today.
At UpSkillZone he is responsible for mentor recruiting, calibration set design, the Cohen's kappa remediation queue, and the contractual framework documented in the mentor agreement. He talks regularly with hiring managers about which signals on a credential actually move the needle in their loops, and feeds that back into rubric design. He holds an M.Eng. in electrical engineering and mentors independently in his spare time.
Reach: founders@upskillzone.com
§4
We are newly launched; no press coverage yet. Reach out and you might be the first.
§5
