Robin Cowie’s startup story starts with a gold mine.

Cowie grew up in apartheid South Africa, the son of a father working as an industrial psychologist training gold mine workers.

To improve the training process, Cowie and his father often filmed instructional videos from the workers’ point of view in the mine. Cowie applied the same point-of-view approach at film school and eventually produced the indie cult classic The Blair Witch Project in 1999 before going on to produce video games, such as Madden NFL.

Eventually, while working with his father on a trade-skill training project during the pandemic, Cowie began fleshing out the concept for Skillmaker.ai, an extended reality (XR) and artificial intelligence workforce development company.

Skillmaker.ai hit the ground running pretty much right away.

The second person Cowie met in the United States had a connection at NAPA Auto Care, which coincidentally was looking for a workforce training partner like Skillmaker.

In 2024, the year the company was founded, it partnered with NAPA Auto Care and was named the 2025 NAPA Auto Care Strategic Partner of the Year.

Skillmaker also closed its pre-seed funding round earlier this year with $4.5 million, according to Cowie.

In April, NAPA Auto Care and Skillmaker.ai announced the NAPA Autotech Xccelerator workforce program, which aims to address auto technician shortages through accelerated training.

“Really, what the Xccelerator does is it delivers contextually relevant, accurate information when you need it,” Cowie said. “So, whether it’s the headset that’s teaching you exactly what you need to know based on where you are, or the glasses that give you an answer to a question in exactly what your situation is, it’s still ultimately delivering content.”

According to Cowie, a previous career in film and video game production prepared him to make informative content as quickly and accurately as possible.

Skillmaker most recently partnered with Whiteville-based Black’s Tire & Auto Service, a family-owned and operated tire and auto service business with 62 locations across North and South Carolina.

As part of the Xccelerator program, Skillmaker plans to offer training to Black’s Tire employees at Southeastern Community College using AI-powered smart glasses. Cowie said Black’s Tire will be one of the first companies in the country to test the glasses.

According to the company, its XR automotive technician training program reduces entry-level training time from two years to just 25 days.

“Yes, we started two years ago, but my dad has been in this space for 50 years. I’ve been in the technology space for 30 years,” Cowie said. “So, there was a very defined problem; we have this kind of skilled worker crisis in the world right now, so it’s a big problem. We have a very specific solution.”

According to Cowie, there’s a shortage of approximately 650,000 auto technicians.

“We’re trying to solve two challenges. First, we want to get young people excited about being a technician,” Cowie said. “But the other job is, how do you take somebody who’s working in a shop and give them more capacity? Now your entry-level technician will not only train, but they have more capacity, more capability, to actually do more work, and they can do it safer, faster.”

Cowie said the Skillmaker’s partnership with Black’s Tire will allow the company to get direct feedback from technicians about how the AI and XR technology works.

“For me, this is really AI for humans,” Cowie said. “Because we are not replacing humans. Quite the opposite. We are getting them more jobs in the workplace.

“It’s very important to me that whatever we’re doing in this technology, who cares about the technology, is it actually making a difference to that technician?”