Building a culture of learning is of critical importance in today’s competitive landscape for the workforce. Employees must be engaged and given growth opportunities in order for an organization to scale to meet its strategic and operational goals. However, most organizations have focused on providing the requisite talent development programs largely to senior-level personnel or through blanket non-specific offerings. GrowthSpace is an outcome-focused talent development platform that focuses on progress-based training, coaching, and mentoring. The platform is data-focused to ensure that employees are matched with relevant experts and that the custom programs are supporting company objectives while measuring outcomes and progression. GrowthSpace offers access to a network of 1500+ experts, focused on 70+ hard and soft developmental skills, that provide programs in varied formats including one-on-one development, group coaching, external and internal mentoring, group training, and workshops. Clients on the platform include Applied Materials, EY, Johnson & Johnson, Lightspeed, the US Government, and Siemens, leading to 5x growth in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in the last year.
AlleyWatch caught up with GrowthSpace Cofounder and CEO Omer Glass to learn more about the business, the company’s strategic plans, latest round of funding, which brings the total funding raised to $44M, and much, much more…
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
$25M Series B led by Zeev Ventures. Existing investors M12 (Microsoft’s venture fund) and Vertex Ventures participated in this round.
Tell us about the product or service that GrowthSpace offers.
The GrowthSpace talent development platform connects employees to relevant experts at scale, supporting employee professional growth. By understanding the challenge of an individual or a group, the platform leverages sophisticated AI algorithms to match them with a proven, relevant expert for a development sprint. This can then be implemented dynamically and at scale, across an entire organization.
The platform can be implemented modularly to address specific requirements or set up as a comprehensive solution, enabling companies to plan and execute various talent development programs. Customers can utilize individual and group coaching, mentoring (internal & external), training, workshops, and lectures. GrowthSpace enables HR and organizational development executives to dynamically allocate resources and funds between different types of programs based on corporate goals and people requirements. This enables a centralized wallet powering a decentralized system that can be driven by each individual and team.
What inspired the start of GrowthSpace?
Our founding team realized that there was no effective, outcome-driven employee development platform to enable companies to better invest in employees. This led to the creation of GrowthSpace.
How is GrowthSpace different?
Other coaching platforms such as Hello Ezra, Torch, CoachHub are single service providers whereas GrowthSpace combines a SaaS platform that supports multi-experience programs for individuals and groups, with a marketplace of 1300 experts (providers of mentoring, coaching, training, and workshops). In addition, the GrowthSpace solutions provide specialist vs generalist services, are mapped to business KPIs providing HR and L&D execs with data-driven ROI dashboards by which to measure the impact of L&D programs on business performance. GrowthSpace’s vision is to disrupt the L&D industry significantly by focusing on talent development as a critical driver of business performance.
What market does GrowthSpace target and how big is it?
GrowthSpace is solving a major challenge in a $360* billion+ market ( HR Predictions for 2022, The Josh Bersin Group). GrowthSpace targets organizations of all sizes from small businesses to large enterprises in any industry.
What’s your business model?
GrowthSpace offers high-level experts in professional development through a scalable platform built for all your employees. The experts represent over 70 domains of hard and soft professional skills, and over 40 languages. We base our cost structure on credits and contracts are typically multi-year credit packages. Credits can be renewed at any time and often are as customers add additional departments and levels.
GrowthSpace offers high-level experts in professional development through a scalable platform built for all your employees. The experts represent over 70 domains of hard and soft professional skills, and over 40 languages. We base our cost structure on credits and contracts are typically multi-year credit packages. Credits can be renewed at any time and often are as customers add additional departments and levels.
How are you preparing for a potential economic slowdown??
We are not experiencing the impact of the economic headwinds as demonstrated by our funding and record growth. The proof of our success is in the growth of our HR user base by +400% and our overall program participant base by +300% since our last round 12 months ago. Perhaps even more impressive is the fact that we have increased our program participant base by +3,000% in the last two years.
Our company mission is to help companies that have realized the importance of talent development during this period encompassing the pandemic and economic uncertainty. To make it through these times successfully, companies need leaders that can effectively cope with business and economic change while achieving key business goals, and empower others to reach their full potential. You will often find that successful companies showing positive business performance are continuing to invest, and even increase investment, in employee development. We believe our results demonstrate this important point as well.
In light of this, all L&D programs should be delivered via virtual platforms enabling all levels of employees to progress professionally by working with coaches, mentors and trainers that represent a large variety of hard and soft skills, domain expertise, and regional/language representation.
What was the funding process like?
I wasn’t actively raising a round. I regularly connect with investors to update them on GrowthSpace’s momentum and haven’t used a funding deck since 2019. Once investors became aware of the recent growth (5x ARR in the last 12 months since the Series A round), they approached us to invest.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
While it may not be the answer for most startups today, we had no problem raising capital. We have strong relationships with our investors and regularly provide updates on the success of our business. These relationships and our rapid growth were the catalysts for investors actually approaching us to provide additional funding. We did not even have a fundraising deck!
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
As mentioned, our quality relationships with investors and GrowthSpace’s achieving 5 x ARR in the last 12 months since the Series A round were the main catalysts.
GrowthSpace has over 200 customers today, 1300 global experts (covering 40+ languages), and 3000 active users. We have contracts with the U.S. Government but cannot be more specific at this time. Other customers include Microsoft, Siemens, Applied Materials, Monday, EY, Lightspeed, and J&J.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
GrowthSpace employs 70 team members which is an increase of 50 employees since October 2021. The goal is to reach 100 employees by the end of the year. In addition, we are significantly expanding operations in North America. And we are investing in our platform to add all types of talent development solutions and services on the platform. This way large enterprises can easily access any services or product they wish, modularly. And mid-market and commercial size companies can leverage GrowthSpace as a ‘one stop shop’ for all things talent development.
What advice can you offer companies in New York that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
While fresh injection of capital is important, it is imperative to not lose sight of achieving impressive annual growth goals, and a core part of being able to do this is investing in employee development. GrowthSpace is a great asset for businesses that need to reach the next level of ARR by cultivating and motivating talent to reach their full potential. Happy and empowered employees are the lifeblood of any successful business large or small, clearly demonstrated in business outcomes.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
GrowthSpace will use these funds to expand globally to meet rapidly growing demand and to continue to further our competitive edge through tech innovation to significantly expand mind and market share.
What’s your favorite restaurant in the city?
PLANTA Queen.
