HowNow, the workforce studying platform, has raised $three million (£2.4m) in a “pre-series A” funding spherical. The spherical is led by Mark Pearson’s Fuel Ventures and brings the overall raised by the startup to $4.5 million.
Other buyers embody Andy Murray OBE; Michael Whitfield and Chris Bruce (founders of Thomsons Online Benefits); Bernie Sinniah (former managing director at Citi Bank); and Alwin Magimay (a former accomplice at McKinsey).
Designed for organisations that wish to help groups with self-directed studying and the event of “business-critical” abilities, HowNow is described as an built-in studying platform that autonomously curates studying sources, “business intelligence” and market insights that reside in varied inner and exterior sources.
The thought is to convey collectively these completely different studying sources — starting from “nuggets” of information shared by present staff to inner information to exterior content material libraries, blogs, podcasts — and match these to completely different job descriptions and worker skill-sets.
This is powered by a browser extension and integrations with Slack, Salesforce, Hubspot and over 300 different apps. Machine-learning can also be employed to push the proper content material to the proper worker.
“Employers can also use HowNow to identify skills gaps within the company based on job market data, via HowNow’s real-time analytics and built-in certification,” provides the corporate. To obtain this, the platform claims to observe over 20,000 job specs to grasp the in-demand abilities and necessities firms are trying to find.
“Based on self-review, peer-review and real-time job market data we build the user’s skill profile as they onboard the platform,” explains HowNow co-founder and CEO Nelson Sivalingam. “Once in HowNow, they see learning recommendations based on assigned learning pathways, their role, skill requirements and internal benchmarks. This content is brought together from a variety of their internal sources (G Drive, Sharepoint, CRM, etc), external sources (content libraries, blogs, podcasts, etc) and the autonomously organised knowledge shared by their peers directly on HowNow”.
Employees can then entry these studying sources instantly throughout the functions they already work with and obtain contextually related solutions powered by HowNow’s “AI”. “For example, they can be in Slack and search all of their learning resources directly from their using the HowNow Slack app,” says Sivalingam. “They can also convert a message from a colleague into a nugget that will get stored and autonomously organised in HowNow”.
Similarly, Sivalingam says that, through HowNow, shopper dealing with groups are in a position to entry up-to-date product data, enterprise intelligence and market insights instantly inside their inbox, CRM and helpdesk, which allows them to cut back buyer response occasions.
“Fast-growing companies like GymShark are able to capture the knowledge in the heads of their internal subject matter experts by giving them a quick and easy way to share knowledge, build a glue between scattered content, avoid repeat questions and get everyone on the same page,” he provides.
To that finish, I’m informed that greater than 500,000 customers presently use HowNow inside over 125 companies. These vary from SMEs to bigger organisations, throughout 14 completely different nations. A basic SaaS play, the startup generates income by means of a licence payment per consumer.
