Key Takeaways
- Risepoint received three 2026 Comparably Best Places to Work awards for Happiest Employees, Best Perks & Benefits, and Best Work-Life Balance.
- The awards reflect employee feedback collected during a year of expansion, including Risepoint’s acquisition of Keypath Education’s North American operations.
- Maintaining employee satisfaction during rapid growth requires attention to workplace flexibility, benefits, career development, and meaningful connections to company goals.
- Remote and distributed organizations need deliberate management practices to build relationships, protect work-life balance, and integrate new colleagues.
- Risepoint’s next challenge will be sustaining its workplace culture as it integrates a larger workforce and expands its university partnerships and healthcare education capabilities.
Companies that grow quickly tend to test their cultures in the process. New programs mean new workloads, new colleagues arrive with their own habits, and the people who were already there have to absorb the change while keeping the existing work on track. The results often show up in employee sentiment before they show up anywhere else.
That makes the timing of the latest Risepoint recognition worth examining. The global education technology company, which supports online programs at more than 100 universities and colleges, announced on Sept. 29 that it had received three Comparably Best Places to Work awards, for Happiest Employees, Best Perks & Benefits, and Best Work-Life Balance. The ratings behind them were collected between Aug. 24, 2025, and Aug. 24, 2026, a year in which the company kept widening its reach and closed with one of its larger moves to date.
A year of expansion
Risepoint entered 2026 with partnerships across more than 100 not-for-profit universities and colleges in five countries. In August, it acquired Keypath Education’s North American operations, adding more than 20 university partnerships and one of the larger clinical placement networks serving online healthcare education. Keypath brings relationships with nearly 15,000 healthcare sites and more than 28,000 preceptors, and it has supported more than 55,000 student placements in fields including speech-language pathology, counseling, clinical social work, and pharmacy.
The deal gives Risepoint a capability many universities struggle to build on their own: placing online students in supervised clinical settings near where they live. It also pushes the company further into healthcare education, where workforce shortages have kept demand for trained clinicians high.
The Comparably window closed six days after the acquisition was announced. The awards therefore describe the workforce Risepoint built before the deal, which is the same workforce now responsible for integrating it.
What the three awards measure
Each category captures something different about that workforce.
Happiest Employees is Comparably’s composite measure of overall sentiment. It weighs employee feedback about the workplace environment, compensation and benefits, excitement about work and colleagues, connection to company goals, and company pride. Best Perks & Benefits considers benefits, paid time off, and other offerings. Best Work-Life Balance looks at hours worked, breaks, time off, and burnout.
For an organization heading into a period of integration, those categories function as a baseline. Pride and connection to company goals indicate whether employees understand and support the strategy. Burnout and hours indicate how much capacity a team has left for new demands. A company that scores well on both enters a busy stretch with some room to absorb the strain.
The fall honors also complement the four Comparably awards Risepoint received in June: Best Career Growth, Best Leadership Teams, Best Sales Teams, and Best Product & Design Teams. The June set measured confidence in leadership and room to advance. The September set measures the everyday experience. Seven awards across one year, drawn from two different angles of the same workforce, give a fuller picture than either round alone.
Leadership’s account
Fernando Bleichmar, who has led Risepoint as CEO since 2022, described the company’s approach in terms of both purpose and flexibility.
“We want our employees to be able to do impactful work while having the flexibility and support they need in their lives outside of work,” Bleichmar said in the announcement. “That means feeling connected to why their work matters, supported by their teams, and able to make space for the people and priorities that matter to them.”
The first part of that statement ties employees to the mission. The second acknowledges that the mission alone won’t hold people if the job consumes the rest of their lives. Comparably’s categories test both halves, and the company’s employees rated it well on each.
Bleichmar has been recognized personally in the same system. In 2024, he received a Comparably Best CEO award that placed him in the top 5% of chief executives at large companies. That year the company also won Best Company Culture, where it ranked in the top 10% of large companies, and appeared on Comparably’s Happiest Employees, Perks & Benefits, Work-Life Balance, and Best Leadership Teams lists. In 2025, it received a Best Leadership Team award and was also recognized for Best Company Outlook.
The distributed model
The more than 1,400 Risepoint employees work remotely across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia, and the company has no single headquarters. According to the announcement, it has kept refining how employees connect, grow, and work together: offering flexibility in how and where people work, investing in benefits and resources for employees at different stages of life and career, and building opportunities for colleagues to form relationships and contribute to the culture.
A distributed structure spreads out the risk of any single site, and it widens the pool of people a company can hire. It also puts more weight on management practices that are easy to neglect, such as protecting time off across time zones and making sure new colleagues feel part of the organization. Those practices will face their next real test as teams from the acquisition join the company.
Why the mission raises the bar
There’s a further reason the employee experience matters at Risepoint in particular. The company’s business is built around working adults. More than 90% of students in Risepoint-supported programs are working adults, and its programs are concentrated in nursing, healthcare, teaching, business, technology, and public service.
Risepoint employees provide technology, integrated marketing and initial student outreach, enrollment support, and student retention services to university partners, which own curriculum, admissions, instruction, and financial aid. Much of that support revolves around helping students keep school, work, and family in balance long enough to finish. In a 2025 independent study by Ipsos, a majority of graduates of Risepoint-supported programs finished without debt, and tuition tended to pay for itself in about 18 months through higher earnings.
A workforce asked to help other people manage competing demands is better placed to do it when its own demands are manageable.
What comes next
Comparably’s ratings accumulate continuously, and each award cycle starts from a new 12-month window. The next set of results will cover the first full year of Risepoint operating with Keypath’s North American business inside it, a larger company with a wider set of programs and partners.
“These awards are especially meaningful because that feedback comes directly from our employees and reflects the experience we are working together to create every day,” Bleichmar said.
That feedback, gathered again over the next year, will offer an unusually direct read on how the expansion is landing with the people carrying it out.
FAQs
What awards did Risepoint receive in 2026?
Risepoint received three Comparably Best Places to Work awards for Happiest Employees, Best Perks & Benefits, and Best Work-Life Balance. The recognition was based on employee ratings collected between August 24, 2025, and August 24, 2026.
How did Risepoint expand its business in 2026?
In August 2026, Risepoint acquired Keypath Education’s North American operations, adding more than 20 university partnerships and an extensive clinical placement network. The acquisition strengthened its position in online healthcare education and expanded its ability to support students seeking supervised clinical experience.
Why are employee satisfaction and work-life balance important during business growth?
Rapid expansion can increase workloads, introduce new working practices, and place additional pressure on existing employees. Strong employee satisfaction and manageable workloads can help organizations maintain engagement and create a more stable foundation for integrating new teams.
What challenges do remote companies face when building workplace culture?
Distributed organizations must create opportunities for employees to build relationships and collaborate despite working across different locations and time zones. They also need clear management practices that support flexibility, protect time off, and help new employees feel included.
What is Risepoint’s role in online higher education?
Risepoint provides university partners with technology, integrated marketing, initial student outreach, enrollment support, and student retention services. Its university partners remain responsible for curriculum, admissions, instruction, and financial aid.