Tech
Check out the exclusive pitch deck that live-learning startup Hone used to raise $30 million for online career training and upskilling
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- Hone is a new career-upskilling startup where instructors teach live online courses for employees.
- Subjects for Hone’s classes range from diversity training and coaching for new managers.
- Hone landed clients like Aramark and Indeed and raised a $30 million Series B that 3L Capital led.
Hone is a workplace-training and upskilling startup where instructors teach live online courses on new skills employees need, with subjects ranging from manager coaching to diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace.
Unlike large, asynchronous online courses like those LinkedIn Learning and Coursera host, live, vetted, and professional teachers lead Hone’s courses. The trainings have multiple sessions and usually last for two months of intensive lessons, with real-time data analytics that track how well employees are absorbing the material.
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The team has also seen rapid growth since the start of the pandemic, when many trainings had to move to virtual formats out of necessity. In the last year, investors have put around $2.1 billion in fresh capital into the virtual-training space, according to Crunchbase. Hone said it was ahead of the curve on this trend, offering online trainings since its founding in 2017.
Tom Griffiths, who previously had cofounded the fantasy-sports company FanDuel; and Savina Perez, who had led marketing for a company-culture-building startup called CultureIQ, cofounded Hone. Both had been looking for ways to improve internal company-training programs, which all felt “stuck in the 1980s,” Griffiths said, especially because there was never a good way to track how effective the courses were in real time.
“Historically, training events were ‘one and done,’ and that’s not really how the brain learns,” Griffiths said. With Hone, students have a month of practice labs after the initial course completes, and then an assessment to assure that the behavior change sticks.
Over 180 companies currently use Hone for corporate training, including Indeed, Aramark, Airtable, and Universal Studios.
This attracted the attention of the investment team at 3L Capital, who signed on to lead Hone’s $30 million Series B round. Invus Opportunities and previous investors F-Prime Capital, Cowboy Ventures, NextGen Venture Partners, Slack Fund, SemperVirens, and Swift Ventures also participated in the round.
The Hone team hopes to use the new funding to expand their course catalog. Upcoming new advanced classes include “Explore Power, Privilege and Inequity at Work, Bridge Cultural Differences Across Your Organization, Run Effective Performance Reviews, Lead Hybrid Teams, and Mindfulness at Work,” a spokesperson told Insider.
Check out the 13-slide pitch deck that Hone used to raise its $30 million Series B round:
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