- Spekit — a company founded by Melanie Fellay and Zari Zahra that makes Salesforce training easier — recently raised funding. Here is how it works.
Spekit, a company that was founded by CEO Melanie Fellay and Head of Product and Technology Zari Zahra, announced recently that it raised $2.54 million in seed funding led Bonfire Ventures with participation from Matchstick Ventures and individual investors, including Dan Scheinman. Spekit is essentially a just-in-time digital adoption platform that enables teams to communicate change and surface training across applications.
Founded last year at Salesforce’s Dreamforce, Spekit is addressing the growing challenges that are associated with new technology adoption, outdated documentation, and decentralized training. Fellay and Zahra found that existing training solutions — by nature of being disconnected from SaaS applications — tend to decrease productivity and are difficult to maintain in constantly changing work environments.
“In today’s SaaS-led workplace, change is constant. To train employees as change occurs, companies had two options: a static LMS that required digging through a separate tool for answers or a painful-to-manage digital walkthrough solution that breaks with any update,” said Fellay. “Having experienced the above challenges as coworkers, we envisioned a simple and intuitive platform that would allow teams to automatically track key processes, maintain up-to-date training and establish a consistent learning experience across all applications.”
How does Spekit work? The company’s unique technology integrates with applications such as Salesforce thus allowing companies to easily create training and documentation around existing processes and terminology. And it has pre-built templates that simplify content creation by generating baseline training specific to each tool. From there, users will see answers popular as embedded help in the applications they’re using and delivering guidance at the point of friction. Another tool that Spekit offers for the training is a Chrome extension.
“Spekit is a key part of every new feature or business process we deploy and has dramatically reduced our onboarding and ramp up time. It’s an outstanding way to support your users, drive adoption and improve data quality,” explained Marshall King, Senior Vice President of IT Solutions at JLL.
Spekit has partnered with innovative companies across real estate, financial services, high tech, health care, etc., including scaling startups and global Fortune 500 companies such as JLL, Built In, Mariner Wealth, and Hobsons.
“As we saw over the last two decades, software is eating the world. The average organization deploys more than 30 SaaS solutions…but, are employees happily eating (“consuming”) the software? Billions in productivity and SaaS investment spend are wasted because teams simply don’t understand how to best leverage the constantly-changing software investments their companies have made,” commented Brett Queener, a partner at Bonfire Ventures.
As Queener is an investor in Spekit, he is bringing more than a decade of experience building Salesforce.com under CEO Marc Benioff across a range of senior leadership roles across Sales, R&D, and Operations.
“We share Spekit’s view that today’s SaaS-led workplace requires a more scalable approach to training and change management than what’s available with a traditional LMS or classroom-style training,” Queener added. “Spekit’s unique approach to tracking changes and creating training by plugging into an organization’s applications, paired with their easy-to-deploy and easy-to-consume just-in-time learning solution is exactly what companies need to drive the adoption and proper usage of their applications. We’re so pleased to partner with Mel, Zari and the team – they’re a terrific founder-led, product-first, game-changing company.”
Photo: Melanie Fellay And Zari Zahra / Credit: Spekit
