Gloat Inc., developer of an internal talent marketplace platform, today said it has raised $90 million in a late-stage Series D round that brings the company’s total funding to more than $192 million.

Gloat’s “workforce agility” platform combines a talent marketplace with artificial intelligence-powered technology that analyzes employees’ skills at large scale and helps managers make more informed decisions about where to apply talent and plan for future skills needs.

The company said that over the past 12 months its customer base has grown 250%, annual recurring revenue tripled and its employee count grew by half, though it didn’t disclose more specifics. Among the customers in more than 120 countries that use its platform are MasterCard Inc., Unilever PLC, Schneider Electric SE, Seagate Technology plc, Nestlé S.A., Novartis AG and HSBC Bank plc.

The platform is both a skills development destination and a place for managers to identify talent gaps and nurture skills development. Its marketplace uncovers the skills, experiences and career goals of employees and connects them to opportunities inside the organization. The workforce intelligence platform helps managers develop talent strategies that anticipate market changes and allocate skills-development resources accordingly.

“It’s easy for organizations to profile their talent into the same roles over and over, but that greatly restricts their agility and limits their employees’ potential,” co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer Danny Shtainberg said in response to emailed questions. “We enable them to see all the skills of their workforce at the most macro level, comprehend how those skills can be applied and democratize opportunities among their own people.”

Engagement dividend

Gloat says its technology can increase retention rates, speed time to market, improve productivity and increase employee engagement. It said Schneider Electric used the platform to reduce the time needed for employees to discover new development opportunities from two weeks to just a few minutes and that Schneider has maintained historical retention rates throughout the Great Resignation.

“Companies are increasingly looking inward,” Shtainberg said. “In the coming months, many businesses won’t have the budget flexibility to recruit heavily outside their workforce.” Using the Gloat platform, he added, “many of the world’s largest employers are unlocking hundreds of thousands of hours and saving tens of millions of dollars.”

The company uses machine learning to help businesses “assess their businesses inefficiencies alongside market, industry, functional and geography-specific trends,” Shtainberg said. “Then the Workforce Intelligence engine analyzes the skills, experiences and aspirations that each employee offers.” As employees interact with the system, they generate more data that is cycled back through the recommendation engine.

The software integrates with major third-party human resources systems and connects data across systems to provide “a single, harmonized data set on the skills and roles across their organization, augmented and accelerated by our own data and inference,” Shtainberg said.

Funding was led by Generation Investment Management LLP with participation from Accel Partners LP, Eight Roads Holdings Ltd., Intel Capital Corp. and Lumir Ventures. Gloat said Generation Investment Management chose the company as the first investment in its new Sustainable Solutions Fund IV because of a shared goal of prioritizing the future of the worker.

Image: Gloat