We are excited to welcome Go1 to the M12 family as the lead for their Series B round. Nagraj Kashyap and I vividly remember meeting Andrew Barnes and Chris Eigeland, two of four co-founders of Go1, for the first time back in July 2018 and immediately thinking – wow, this team has built a product that will transform the corporate learning space. The market is large with over $7.5 billion spent per year on external training services by companies in the US alone. The investment aligns well with Microsoft’s mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more, and we wanted to share why we think Go1 has created a meaningful new platform.
Over the past 18 months, we spent significant time in the broader learning and development space, and while we found the space crowded, the macro fundamentals point to a large emphasis on employee development and learning over the next decade. Millennials are forecasted to account for over 75% of the global working population by 2025 yet Gallup reports that millennial job turnover costs the US economy $30.5 billion annually. According to EBRI, from 1983 to 2018, there has been a meaningful 47% decrease in gender-adjusted employment tenures. To minimize employee attrition and reduce turnover costs, companies are making significant investments in internal training, including reskilling. Regulations like GDPR have also created a need for more specialized training to cater to regional and industry specific compliance requirements. To meet the above needs, most enterprises on average end up with 30+ vendors, each with different procurement requirements, and consistently re-evaluate them based on who has more relevant courses.
“Millennials are forecasted to account for over 75% of the global working population by 2025 yet Gallup reports that millennial job turnover costs the US economy $30.5 billion annually.”
Go1 brings a consumer led experience to an inherently enterprise product. With a business model paralleling Spotify, Go1 simplifies purchasing, consumption and engagement for both employers and employees. Go1 partners with 1,000+ content providers to offer a comprehensive content library, enabling training needs to be met for every single team within a company with a single subscription. Go1 is the one-stop shop for everything from multi-jurisdictional compliance training to personal development courses for employees, eliminating the need to make hard choices on what kind of training to offer employees.
Go1 is redefining how enterprises procure training content and how employees in turn consume it via a modern user-experience and a single subscription. And while it was clear to us that customer love was responsible for Go1’s rapid growth, the incredible passion of the founding team to create an easier way to learn is what truly sealed the deal with the M12 team.
We are excited to partner with existing investors SEEK, YC and individuals like Steve Baxter, who have helped the company from inception in 2015. Our goal is to leverage Microsoft’s broad reach, including our portfolio development team and co-sell programs, to be the accelerant in the next part of Go1’s journey as they transform the way people learn across the world.
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