Main Highlights:
- GrowthSpace reported that it has secured $25 million in funding.
- Upskilling and reskilling businesses garnered $2.1 billion in venture capital funding between early 2021 and 2022.
- GrowthSpace, which employs 70 individuals, 50 of whom are based in Israel, links employees to relevant expertise on a large scale.
GrowthSpace, created by Omer Glass, is one of the winners, using algorithms to link individual employees and groups of employees with specialists for development sprints.
GrowthSpace reported today that it has secured $25 million in Series B funding led by Zeev Ventures, with participation from M12 (Microsoft’s venture fund) and Vertex Ventures, bringing its total raised to $44 million.
Companies are laser-focused on retaining employees while the employment market remains tight (major layoffs and hiring freezes in IT aside). Upskilling is one of the areas in which they are investing, with the goal of teaching staff new skills in departments with which they are unfamiliar. For example, Walmart said in 2021 that it will invest almost $1 billion over the following five years to give access to higher education and training to its employees.
Unsurprisingly, these expenditures have greatly helped “skilling” platforms. Upskilling and reskilling businesses garnered $2.1 billion in venture capital funding between early 2021 and 2022.
GrowthSpace, which employs 70 individuals, 50 of whom are based in Israel, links employees to relevant expertise on a large scale. The platform may be installed in modules to solve specific needs or as a complete solution, allowing businesses to plan and execute diverse talent development initiatives. Individual and group coaching, mentoring (internal and external), training, workshops, and lectures are all available to customers.
“Demand for our solutions is high, as seen by our 5x ARR increase in the previous year.” Furthermore, we have established a network of 1,500 professionals in over 50 countries, and we look forward to increasing our reach and influence even further,” said Omer Glass, CEO and Co-Founder of GrowthSpace.
Dan Terner, Izhak Kedar, and Glass created GrowthSpace in 2018. Glass, a former management consultant, was approached some years ago by Terner, then the COO of Signals Analytics, a firm with a high attrition rate.
“Terner discovered there was no effective, outcome-driven employee development platform to help organisations [like his] to better engage in their workers,” Glass explained. “This resulted in the formation of GrowthSpace… Companies understood they needed to double down on talent development during the epidemic and in the present economic climate.”
GrowthSpace combines a software-as-a-service platform with a marketplace of specialists – mentors, coaches, trainers, and workshop facilitators. The platform’s AI algorithm seeks to anticipate the correct programmes and coach-student pairings with the best chance of attaining targeted development results by drawing on a taxonomy of professional backgrounds and abilities that includes tags across knowledge areas, sectors, and jobs.
Of course, AI isn’t always correct. Biased datasets can result in incorrect forecasts and, in certain cases, coach-student pairings. Upskilling already suffers from a human bias problem, according to PwC data, which shows that firms prioritise upskilling postgraduate degree holders above practically all others. Workers are frequently passed over for training based on their ethnicities and genders, according to PwC, with women being twice as likely as men to claim gender discrimination.
GrowthSpace’s debiasing efforts when requested. However, he stated that the AI system attempts to reduce prejudice by providing each user with a “mirror data image” that eliminates personal factors such as colour, gender, and age.
“Within three weeks of user onboarding, GrowthSpace has built a unique algorithm that wipes 90% of users’ personal data from its platform, once the data is no longer in regular usage,” Glass added. “This allows it to limit its exposure to user personal data to a bare minimum.”
The GrowthSpace platform may be implemented modularly to meet the needs of bigger organisations or set up as a full solution, allowing executives to shift resources between different sorts of initiatives. All of the startup’s services are linked to company KPIs, giving management information on the impact of upskilling programmes on business performance.
“The sector must adapt dramatically over the next decade to fulfil the demands for firm growth and professional development,” Glass added. “The Great Recession emphasised the significance of precisely monitoring growth, providing more scalable and consistent mechanisms for people to upskill and reskill at a much faster pace.” Learning and development must be more nimble and responsible as well.”
GrowthSpace competes with platforms such as GOMYCODE, Worker.ai, and Scaler, the latter of which was valued at $700 million in January. However, Glass claims that GrowthSpace has grown significantly in the last year, with 3,000 active users across 200 paying customers, including a US government agency, Microsoft, Siemens, EY, and Johnson & Johnson.
“Once investors got aware of the recent rise,” he explained, “they approached [me] to invest.” “GrowthSpace will use these funds to expand worldwide in order to fulfil rapidly increasing demand and to maintain its competitive edge via technological innovation.”
The firm, which has $44 million in the bank, also wants to grow its 70-person team in New York City, with the objective of reaching 100 workers by the end of the year.