With the job market still tight (apart from mass layoffs and hiring freezes in the tech industry), companies are doing everything in their power to retain staff. One area they are investing in is upskilling. This is aimed at teaching new skills in departments employees are unfamiliar with. Walmart, for example, announced in 2021 that it will invest about $1 billion over the next five years to provide employees with access to higher education and training.
Unsurprisingly, the “skills” platform has benefited greatly from these investments. The upskilling and reskilling startup has raised $2.1 billion from VCs between early 2021 and 2022, according to Crunchbase. His one of the winners is GrowthSpace, founded by Omer Glass. It leverages algorithms to match individual employees and groups of employees with experts in development sprints. The company announced today that he has raised $25 million in Series B funding led by Zeev Ventures, with participation from M12 (Microsoft’s venture fund) and Vertex Ventures. This brings GrowthSpace’s total funding to his $44 million.
GrowthSpace was founded in 2018 by Dan Terner, Izhak Kedar and Glass. A former management consultant, Glass said several years ago he was approached by Terner. Terner was the COO of Signals Analytics, which at the time had significant churn issues.
“Terner realized that there was no effective, results-driven employee development platform that allowed companies to reach their full potential. [including his] To better invest in our employees,” said Glass. “This led to the creation of GrowthSpace…During the pandemic and the current economic uncertainty, companies realized they needed to double down on their talent development.”
GrowthSpace combines a Software-as-a-Service platform with a professional marketplace (mentoring, coaching, training, and workshop provider). The platform’s AI models leverage taxonomies of professional backgrounds and skills, including tags across disciplines, industries, and roles, to identify the right programs and coaches and students most likely to achieve desired development outcomes. Attempts to predict matches.
Image credit: growth space
Of course, AI isn’t always right. A skewed dataset can lead to unreliable predictions and, in some cases, coach-student agreement. Upskilling is already plagued with human biases, with PwC research finding companies are putting too much emphasis on upskilling graduate degree holders, at the expense of almost everyone else. is shown. A PwC study found that workers were often denied training based on ethnicity and gender, and women reported twice as much sexism as men.
When asked, Glass did not provide a detailed explanation of GrowthSpace’s debiasing efforts. But AI systems try to mitigate bias by presenting a “mirror data image” of each user that excludes personal characteristics such as race, gender and age, he said.
“GrowthSpace has developed a unique algorithm that removes 90% of a user’s personal data from the platform within three weeks of user onboarding once the data is no longer in frequent use,” said Glass. “[This enables] It’s about minimizing exposure to users’ personal data. ”
The GrowthSpace platform can be implemented modularly to meet the requirements of large enterprises or set up as a comprehensive solution, said Glass. All startup services are mapped to business KPIs, providing executives with reports to measure the impact of upskilling programs on business performance.
Mr Glass said: “The Great Recession highlighted the importance of measuring growth more accurately, providing a more scalable and consistent means for employees to upskill and reskill at a much faster pace. and development also need to be more agile and accountable.”
GrowthSpace competes with platforms such as GOMYCODE, Worker.ai, and Scaler, the last of which surpassed the $700 million valuation in January. But according to Glass, GrowthSpace has grown significantly over the past year and now has 3,000 active users with 200 paying customers, including US government agencies, Microsoft, Siemens, EY, and Johnson & Johnson. I’m here.
In fact, Glass said he wasn’t actively trying to raise money.
“Once investors noticed the recent growth…they came closer [me] I will invest,” he said. “GrowthSpace will use these funds to expand globally, meet rapidly growing demand, and continue to expand our competitive edge through technological innovation.”
The startup, which has $44 million in the bank, also plans to expand its 70-person team based in New York City, with a goal of reaching 100 employees by the end of the year.
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