Hone, a workplace training platform company, has raised $3.6 million in seed funding led by Cowboy Ventures and Harrison Metal. Slack Fund, Reach Capital, Rethink Education, Day One Ventures, Entangled Ventures, David Rogier (Masterclass CEO), Rachel Carlson (Guild Education CEO), Pete Kazanjy (Atrium HQ co-founder), and Jeff Fernandez (Grovo co-founder) also participated in this round.
With this funding round, it will accelerate Hone’s platform expansion, support growth, and develop additional programs for serving small businesses, mid-markets, and enterprise organizations. Hone’s customers include WeWork, Clear, App Annie, Dashlane, Omada Health, SoulCycle, and many others.
Currently, the corporate training and leadership development industry is sized at more than $30 billion annually in the U.S. However, research shows that trainees forget 70% of what they are taught within 24 hours of training, according to Learning Solutions. And teams are more geographically dispersed than ever before plus work-at-home has grown by 140% since 2005. There are more than 4.3 million employees who work remotely at least half the time.
“As we scaled FanDuel from five founders to over 500 employees across eight time zones there was no complete solution for training our emerging leaders, let alone a way to measure the impact of that training”, said Hone co-founder and CEO Tom Griffiths — who is also a former co-founder and chief product officer of FanDuel. “As organizations grow ever more distributed, we were inspired to create Hone to modernize how the world’s best companies develop their current and future leaders. We’re thrilled to have this exceptional set of partners with us on that mission.”
Hone is also a member of the PeopleTech Partners network and is advised by top executive coaches, psychologists, and practitioners to ensure best-in-class training. Josh Bersin, the founder of Bersin by Deloitte, recently joined Hone’s advisor team.
“Companies large and small hope to develop modern leaders who work with increasingly distributed and diverse teams. It’s amazing that until now there hasn’t been a modern solution to deliver an interactive, scalable, convenient and measurable training and development platform to help companies develop modern leaders and managers,” added Cowboy Ventures founder and managing partner Aileen Lee. “The Hone team’s personal connection with the market need and their skillsets are incredibly suited to deliver a world-class, delightful solution to talent teams and employees around the world.”
Founded by Griffiths, Jeremy Hamel (former head of product at CultureIQ), and Savina Perez (former VP of Marketing at CultureIQ), Hone is considered a better alternative to traditionally expensive and time-consuming workshops and e-learning videos that do not fit busy schedules or remote workforces.
“The Hone founders’ vision for education and personal development at work is exactly what the market needs. I see the need to improve the performance of people managers across industries and in companies of all sizes,” Harrison Metal founder Michael Dearing commented. “Hone’s technique of matching just the right training to just the right colleague at the moment they need via the Hone platform is powerful and highly effective. Investing was an easy decision.”
Hone’s large-scale platform provides synchronous online instructor-led training programs that enable a spectrum of live corporate training needs in a single solution. Hone offers interactive 60-90 minute classes on leadership, management, and people skills.
“Live, expert-led experiences are still one of the most compelling ways to learn,” Bersin explained. “Hone’s innovative platform has the potential to unleash expert and instructor-led training in a highly scalable, engaging, and modern way.”
