NEW YORK — Sept. 22, 2021 — GrowthSpace, a global leader in personalized talent development programs, today announced that it has secured a $15 million Series A investment round. The financing was co-led by M12, Microsoft’s venture fund, and Vertex Ventures. This latest round of funding brings GrowthSpace’s total amount raised to $19 million. The recent fundraise will be used to grow the company’s team globally and expand its proven, first-in-market technology, which connects employees to relevant experts at scale.
“We deeply believe that there is greatness in everyone. If you had just one employee to develop, you would understand their challenge and match them with an expert in that specific challenge, right? This is precisely why we created GrowthSpace — to deliver the world’s most accurate and effective learning and development solution, leveraging data to achieve great results,” said Omer Glass, GrowthSpace co-founder and CEO. “We’re thrilled with the Series A investment from Microsoft’s M12 and Vertex Ventures, which will enable us to grow and bring our data-driven and highly personalized employee development approach to more companies in corporate America that want to take their learning and development to the next level.”
GrowthSpace provides an algorithm-powered system backed by real-world skill mapping that ensures the perfect matches between employees and experts every time. The GrowthSpace platform addresses the most critical issues associated with traditional coaching and mentoring programs, including their inability to scale and difficulties associated with the measurement of employee progress. The platform also delivers digital training, coaching and mentoring, as well as lectures and workshops, to any location in the world. The result is collaboration that ensures that corporate training objectives are achieved.
With GrowthSpace, companies no longer have to dedicate budget to one-size-fits-all learning and development programs with unpredictable results. Instead, one-on-one development sprints from GrowthSpace facilitate cooperation between employees and managers, enabling them to define and execute challenge-based professional growth programs that are linked directly to business KPIs.
A Customer Becomes an Investor
Acquired by McDonald’s in 2019, Dynamic Yield, a provider of experience optimization technology that helps companies quickly build and test personalized, optimized and synchronized digital customer experiences, is using GrowthSpace for upskilling its managers as the company grows. Dynamic Yield implemented GrowthSpace to match its managers to an expert, according to their goals.
According to Liad Agmon, Dynamic Yield CEO, employees achieved personal and professional development, while the company itself obtained real data around the program’s results combining inputs from the participants and their managers.
“GrowthSpace helped us match the right experts with the right employees. By using the advanced data capabilities of the GrowthSpace platform, we could track employee progress before, during and after each personal development sprint and correlate those activities to business results,” he said. “The ability to offer tailored and personalized professional development not only to executives, but also mid management and individual contributors, is aligned with our innovative, employee-centric culture that leads to better, happier and more fulfilled employees. Because I saw the effectiveness of the program in my own company, I became a GrowthSpace investor.”
The Right Solution at the Right Time
The GrowthSpace approach to employee learning and development — which integrates more than 300 hard and soft competencies, taught by close to 1,000 experts in more than 30 languages across some 40 countries — has been enthusiastically received by global enterprises in support of both training and employee retention. In fact, 96% of employees who have experienced a GrowthSpace program and 80% of their direct managers have reported improvement in the desired business KPIs. One primary reason for the company’s explosive growth is that companies have been looking for a modern solution to retain employees, which is increasingly difficult in today’s fragmented remote workforce.
Customers currently enjoying the benefits of the GrowthSpace solution include Applied Materials, Checkpoint, Johnson & Johnson, Intel, Nespresso, Gainsight, and Taboola.
Satisfying a Significant Market Need
The design and implementation of the GrowthSpace model ensures sufficient oversight so that talent development programs stay on a path towards desired results, ultimately leading to better training outcomes for both employers and employees.
“Companies of all sizes strive to realize value from learning and development programs, while employees want and need solutions that will help them achieve their next career goals,” said Irad Dor, partner at M12. “The GrowthSpace platform provides an effective learning and development framework, including much-needed skills-matching and data and analytics to determine the true ROI of employee coaching. Their solution is a breakthrough because it brings professional, personalized coaching to every employee, at-scale, and the company has built an impressive track record in a short time.”
“With a powerful solution and a capable team, GrowthSpace is in the right place at the right time,” observed Aviad Ariel, general partner at Vertex Ventures. “Several of our portfolio companies are already using GrowthSpace. In fact, we discovered GrowthSpace after asking members of our HR forum, which includes all the human resources managers from our portfolio companies, to identify the most valuable and meaningful platform they are using. GrowthSpace emerged as the clear answer.”
About GrowthSpace
GrowthSpace was founded on the belief that the future of learning and development is data-driven, measurable and personalized for every employee. By combining the world’s most robust dataset and their network of global experts, they help employees and teams achieve their professional goals and business KPIs at scale. Programs range from short growth sprints and group meetings to lectures where employees can upskill, work on personal challenges, and improve their core competencies. GrowthSpace was founded in 2019 by Omer Glass, CEO, Dan Terner, COO, and Izhak Kedar, CTO.
