Canadian corporate development software startup Cognota Inc. has closed on a $5.5 million early-stage round of funding.

Today’s Series A round was led by Grotech Ventures and saw participation from IDEA Fund Partners, BDC Capital, Generation Ventures, CEAS Investments, Tyton Partners and angel investors Neal Dempsey and Jay Steinfeld.

Cognota is the creator of a “LearnOps” platform that enables corporate learning and development teams to manage their end-to-end operations and measure return on investment from their learning programs. Among other things, its software helps teams streamline their training intake, project and capacity planning, as well as their educational content design processes.

Corporate learning and development professionals can thus work more efficiently, the startup says. It also provides these teams with access to data and insights into their programs.

Using Cognota’s platform and insights, teams will gain better visibility into the training needs of their employee base. It also allows them to consolidate a range of disparate tools they use, and with that enables them to make more strategic decisions about their training investments.

According to Cognota, it’s not easy for corporate learning teams to measure ROI. But if they have a way to measure this, they’ll be able to see the value and impact of their investments in relation to key business objectives, and prioritize the ones that have the most impact.

The importance of measuring ROI on learning and development is clear when one considers the size of the industry. Globally, organizations spend a combined $320 billion on their corporate learning endeavors, Cognota says.

Cognota is able to measure the impact of these initiatives by integrating workflows such as intake and program management with budget and resource allocation data. It then uses advanced analytics to help teams understand the value they’re getting from these budget and resources allocations. Companies can foster a culture of accountability and drive better outcomes in corporate training, the startup promises.

Among other claims, Cognota says customers have seen a 90% reduction in the time it takes to respond to training requests, while reducing the time spent on managing learning projects by as much as 70%.

Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said businesses today are living in an “ops era” that began with ITOps and DevOps and later expanded to more recent concepts such as RevOps and FinOps.

“There’s absolutely no reason why we can’t have LearnOps too, helping enterprises to manage all aspects of their learning operations,” the analyst said. “This is where Cognota wants to be king, and it’s doing so by tackling the key challenge around learning effectiveness. Enterprises struggle to understand how effective their training programs are, and it’s difficult to know who should learn what and how well those lessons are retained. They also need to see which learning techniques are the most successful. Cognota’s innovation is good to see, as skills are what fuels the future of work.”

Cognota Chief Executive Ryan Austin his company’s ability to close on the new round without any liquidity preferences is a validation of the value its platform delivers. “Raising Series A in the current environment is not easy for a startup,” he said. “Learning and development is increasingly a driver for performance, and our platform provides the essential infrastructure for organizations to save time, increase output and measure impact.”

The startup says it has gained a lot of momentum this year, forging key partnerships with workplace software providers such as ROI Institute Inc., Bluewater Learning Inc. and Schoox LLC to provide more comprehensive tools to L&D teams.

Today’s round comes just months after Cognota received $1.9 million in funding from the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario. Looking forward, Cognota said it will use the money to meet the rising demand for its platform from enterprises, accelerate its product development and create the world’s first LearnOps certification program.

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