Skills intelligence platform that redefines how enterprises understand, develop and mobilize talent, Workera has announced the raise of $23.5 million in a series B funding round to expand product offerings.
The funding round was led by Jump Capital with participation from existing investors such as NEA, Owl Ventures, Sozo Ventures, and AI Fund.
Commenting on the recent fundraising, Workera CEO Kian Katanforoosh said that the fresh funds will be put toward expanding Workera’s product offerings and growing the size of its developer team.
Tekedia Mini-MBA edition 14 (June 3 – Sept 2, 2024) begins registrations; get massive discounts with early registration here.
Tekedia AI in Business Masterclass opens registrations here.
Join Tekedia Capital Syndicate and invest in Africa’s finest startups here.
In his words,
“We have been fortunate to secure a sizable capital round amid a difficult environment largely owning to our success thus far and growing roster of Fortune 500 clients. The pandemic and the current market have forced companies to reassess their operating costs, look internally to develop employees and fill skills gaps in their business. This climate presents a market opportunity for us to drive increased sales of our precision upskilling solution as enterprises look to intelligently invest in and support their talent”.
He added, “The technology landscape is constantly evolving, and new technologies emerge regularly, that is why I expect enterprises to increase their spend on upskilling and retaining their employees to build technology skills like AI. The half-life of skills is also the lowest it has ever seen, so reinvention is the new norm for employees in the enterprise”.
With Workera, companies employees get role and goal specific learning plans, while companies have the ability to measure skills and create custom upskilling plans. Using a skills dataset with millions of measurements across over 7,000 skills to train AI algorithms, Workera claims to be able to understand the relationship between skills and measure more skills in less time by inferring whether someone has a skill or not.
Workera as a skills intelligence platform is redefining how enterprises understand, develop, and mobilize talent. It provides actionable skills data that inform firms talent strategies across hiring, upskilling, and mentorship.Currently spanning technologies like data science, AI, software, machine learning, cloud, and more, the startup domains and measurement evolve with the pace of the industry.
It would be recalled that Workera in 2020 raised a $5 million seed fund to further extend its adaptive skills assessments platform that helps workers unlock their full potential in data science, machine learning and other AI technologies. The World Economic forum (WEF) predicts upwards of 150 million new AI-related jobs will be created in the next two years, while only 300,000 AI professionals exist in the global workforce today.
To address the growing challenge, Workera founders Katanforoosh and Lee took an inventive bottoms-up approach to assessing and benchmarking skills that directly maps to enterprise-wide development. Informed by their experience teaching AI to over millions of people and upskilling 100+ Fortune 500 companies, the team devised a suite of computerized adaptive assessments to evaluate the more than 500 micro skills needed to carry out the essential tasks that make up Data and AI projects.