I’m excited to welcome GrowthSpace—personalized talent development at-scale—to the M12 portfolio as co-lead of their Series A round, alongside Vertex Ventures.

I’ve been following the GrowthSpace team for years now, and have been impressed by their vision to make every employee great—an aspiration that emerged from their personal experiences as managers and servant leaders. While the eLearning market is relatively mature, expert-led employee development is ready for disruption. In discussions with Learning & Development leaders, managers, and coaches, we learned that the GrowthSpace team has managed to identify and elegantly address three market failures in employee development:

1. The unmet appetite for personalized, human-delivered learning experiences shared by employees at all levels, regardless of seniority. Unfortunately, bespoke personal development, like coaching, is largely reserved for senior-level executives, leaving junior employees underserved by sporadic mentorship. 
2. The challenge of delivering personalized professional development at-scale, and the inability of HR leaders to capitalize on the correlation of 1-on-1 learning with employee skill-building, satisfaction, and retention. 
3. The lack of an effective digital platform to supply experts like coaches and trainers with a steady stream of clients.

GrowthSpace is an enterprise platform that enables companies to run live, online, 1-on-1 personal development sessions or group programs for professional growth. The solution uses data and historical feedback to connect employees with experts who specialize in a specific skill. During a client engagement, GrowthSpace helps managers and employees define clear goals to ensure that progress aligns to desired business outcomes. Finally, when sessions are completed, the system collects feedback and reports results.

GrowthSpace provides Learning & Development leaders with a single platform through which they can procure a wide range of employee development programs. The marketplace platform boasts development offerings on over 300 competencies taught by nearly 1000 experts in 30 languages globally.

The company counts several industry leaders amongst its customer base, including Johnson & Johnson, Intel, Nespresso, and Ernst & Young. GrowthSpace sees a 99.9% completion rate amongst customers’ employees, helping companies capitalize on the retention benefits of personalized development. 96% of individuals who engage with GrowthSpace and 80% of their direct managers report improvement in correlated business metrics. 

GrowthSpace has an incredible founding team at the helm, and I’ve enjoyed getting to know them better over the past several months. CEO Omer Glass is a former entrepreneur and management consultant with training in behavioral economics. COO Dan Terner has great experience as a C-level leader at technology startups. CTO Izhak Kedar rounds out the leadership team as a seasoned technologist with HRtech experience. 

This latest round of funding will be used to expand the GrowthSpace team globally and to broaden their go-to-market efforts. I’m excited to co-lead the Series A alongside Vertex Ventures, and to serve as a board director of the organization. 

Congratulations to Omer, Dan, Izhak, and the entire team on this major milestone. We look forward to your continued success.