Tel Aviv, Israel – October 3, 2019 – Strigo, a customer training management (CTM) company that powers product training, announced the close of a $2.5M Seed Round, led by Hanaco Ventures, with participation from Greycroft.
Since launching in 2017, Strigo has been at the forefront of an industry-wide surge towards customer training. For enterprise software, the proposition is clear: training has become a key driver for customer success. This insight is backed by the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA), whose research finds that trained customers are 12% more likely to renew a service contract.
Strigo meets this growing market with a unique focus: to power excellent training. Devised as remote training – as close as possible to real-life – the cloud-based-platform is founded on a methodology of ‘learning by doing’. To date, Strigo has delivered over 1,500,000 hours of training for industry-leading clients including Docker, Elastic (ESTC), and VMware (VMW).
Comprising a suite of hands-on pedagogical tools, Strigo is easily customized to deliver intuitive and effective product learning. The tools are built for versatility: clients adapt training to meet the ever-changing needs of customers. The results are striking: when a customer is engaged, they develop a deep relationship with the product. All the metrics point upwards, with Strigo’s clients reporting increased customer satisfaction and retention, and accelerated product adoption.
Clients use Strigo to onboard new customers and to train existing customers on product updates – improving their level of expertise – and increasingly, for ‘prospect training’, allowing customers to ‘try before they buy’.
“Strigo is the next generation in customer success. In today’s subscription economy, you must ensure customers continue to benefit from your product,” says Nevo Peretz, CEO and Co-Founder of Strigo. “We’ve seen customer training evolve from being a one-time event into a continuous process, addressing different expectations throughout the customer journey. Our clients harness Strigo to deliver active, engaging learning, choosing the correct modality to match their customers’ needs.”
Strigo’s emphasis on the training experience is rooted in the experience of two of its founders, Amit Cohen and Ben Shoval, both former IT consultants. Their previous firm, Fewbytes, an IT consultancy, provided in-person product training. As the firm grew, their hands-on approach simply couldn’t scale. Remote platforms available at the time couldn’t substitute the authentic, interpersonal environment needed to effectively teach complex products.
To complete the core team, Amit and Ben were joined by experts from the software industry: Nevo Peretz, formerly head of business development for the breakout startup Monday.com, who serves as CEO, and Daniel Wolf, former manager of Oracle’s cloud training platform, who serves as CTO.
“Strigo’s technology transforms the way companies onboard and train their customers,” says Pasha Romanovski, Co-Founder & General Partner at Hanaco. “We see most of Strigo’s clients grow and use the platform across different parts of the organization. I believe this reflects a trend of how important customer success is throughout an entire SaaS organization.”
With the new funding, Strigo’s team plans to expand the platform, develop new product capabilities, and expand into new markets.
“Strigo’s product redefines how enterprise companies deliver corporate learning and customer training,” says Will Szczerbiak, Principal at Greycroft. “Today, enterprises tend to patch solutions together when training and the resulting experience is clunky and inefficient. Strigo has a terrific opportunity to become the ‘Training Cloud’ by merging training into one platform, creating a new way for enterprises to delight customers and differentiate.”
About Strigo
Strigo is a customer training management (CTM) company that powers product training. Strigo’s browser-based environments come with built-in virtual labs, making hands-on training sessions far more efficient and easier to manage. For more on Strigo, visit https://strigo.io.
About Hanaco Ventures
Hanaco Ventures backs early-stage technology companies with bold, visionary and passionate Israeli entrepreneurs, wherever they are across the globe. Hanaco was founded by Alon Lifshitz, Lior Prosor and Pasha Romanovski in 2017. For more on Hanaco, visit https://hanacovc.com.
About Greycroft
Greycroft is a seed-to-growth venture capital firm that partners with exceptional entrepreneurs to build the world’s most transformative companies. Greycroft has made over 300 investments across the tech sector, including Acorns, Huffington Post, Icertis, Plated, Shipt, TheRealReal, Thrive Market, Trunk Club, and Venmo. For more information, please visit: www.greycroft.com.
