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With the job market tight (mass layoffs and hiring in tech aside), companies are keeping laser-focused workers. One of the areas they have invested in is competency, which aims to teach their employees new skills in an unfamiliar department. For example, Walmart announced in 2021 that it will invest nearly $1 billion over the next five years to provide higher education and training opportunities for its employees.
Unsurprisingly, “talent” platforms have benefited greatly from these investments. According to Crunchbase, between 2021 and the beginning of 2022, trained and trained startups raised $2.1 billion from VCs. One of the winners is GrowthSpace, founded by Omer Glass, which uses algorithms to match individual employees and groups of employees with professionals. The company announced today that it has raised $25 million in Series B financing led by Zeev Ventures with participation from M12 (a Microsoft venture fund) and Vertex Ventures, bringing GrowthSpace’s total funding to $44 million.
GrowthSpace in 2010 Founded in 2018 by Dan Tenner, Isaac Kedar and Glass. A former management consultant, Glass was approached several years ago by Tenner, who was then the COO of Signals Analytics, a company with significant problems.
“Turner realized that there was no effective, results-based employee development platform to enable companies [including his] To better invest in their workforce,” Glass said. “This has created room for growth…During the pandemic and the current economic uncertainty, companies have realized they need to double down on talent development.
GrowthSpace combines a software-as-a-service platform with a marketplace of experts – mentoring, coaching, training and workshops. Drawing on a taxonomy of professional backgrounds and skills, including labels across professional sectors, industries and roles, the platform’s AI model tries to predict the right programs and the most likely to achieve the desired development outcomes of a coach-student.
Image Credits: GrowthSpace
Of course, AI does not always understand it correctly. Biased data sets can lead to unreliable predictions, and – as the case may be – coach-student mismatches. Upskilling has been plagued by human bias, with research from PwC showing that companies place a strong emphasis on professionals with postgraduate degrees at almost all costs. Employees are often passed over for training based on their ethnicity and gender, according to PwC, with women twice as likely as men to report gender discrimination.
When asked, Glass did not provide a detailed account of GrowthSpace’s deceptive efforts. But he said the AI system tries to reduce bias by providing a “mirror data image” of each user that excludes personal characteristics such as race, gender and age.
“GrowthSpace has developed a unique algorithm that deletes 90% of a user’s personal data from the platform within three weeks if the data is not used frequently,” Glass said. “[This enables] To minimize exposure to user personal information.
The GrowthSpace platform can be implemented in a modular fashion to address the requirements of large corporations or as a comprehensive solution, Glass said, allowing executives to allocate resources between different types of programs. All startup services are mapped to business KPIs to provide reports to measure the impact of skills programs on business performance.
“In the next decade, the industry will need to evolve significantly to meet the company’s growth and professional development needs,” Glass said. “The Great Recession underscored the importance of accurately measuring growth by giving employees a faster pace and a more scalable and consistent method to develop their skills. Learning and development must be agile and accountable.”
GrowthSpace competes with platforms like GOMYCODE, Worker.ai and Scaler, the latter of which was valued at $700 million in January. But Glass said GrowthSpace has seen significant growth in the past year, now reaching 3,000 active users across 200 paying clients, including US government agencies, Microsoft, Siemens, EE and Johnson & Johnson.
In fact, Glass said he is not actively looking to raise capital.
“Once investors are aware of the latest developments… they approach [me] to invest,” he said. “GrowthSpace will use these funds to expand globally to meet rapidly growing demand and expand its competitive edge through technological innovation.”
The startup — which has $44 million in the bank — also plans to expand its New York City team of 70 people, with plans to reach 100 employees by the end of the year.
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