Upduo, the peer-to-peer learning platform for data-driven teams, today announces that it has raised $4 million in seed capital. The funding round was led by Impact Venture Capital with participation from Sky9 Capital and angels like Tim Crow, the former Chief HR Officer of Home Depot.
Upduo originated in a high school math class where co-founder, teacher Mike Mendelson, connected students to help one another through difficult questions. This learning application quickly evolved to the workplace where teams collaborated on best practices to enhance their personal career growth while driving business results. Today, Upduo uses education and peer-to-peer learning best practices to empower sales and retail workers to be fast, prepared, and engaged.
Upduo identifies the ideal pairs in a company to practice skills and have intentional conversations around core business topics. Partners then connect on the Upduo mobile app to have guided one-on-one video conversations designed to boost confidence, practice new concepts, and ask questions. For example, sales reps connect to practice a new pitch, discuss new product offerings, and share best practices for delighting customers. Upduo sessions are meant to be short and engaging, utilizing gratification features to help workers feel recognized for their achievements while its team of licensed educators helps companies design the perfect conversations to maximize engagement, authenticity and impact.
“We’re excited for the support from Impact Venture Capital, whose focus on AI aligns with our mission to revolutionize the way workers and sales teams learn in the workplace by using data and technology. Currently, the Upduo platform is extremely data-rich, with Impact Venture Capital by our side, we look forward to using our data for predictive insights to help every worker reach their fullest potential,” said Wei Sun, co-founder and CEO of Upduo.
Since 2020, over 500,000 learning sessions have happened on Upduo with teams located across more than 1,000 customer locations. Upduo works with notable clients like Amazon, Motorola, McKinsey, and Prime Communications. Teams that consistently use Upduo for internal training experience a significant improvement in the metrics they focus on like employee retention and add-on sales.
“Upduo is well positioned to change the way employees learn in the workplace,” said Jack Crawford, Founding General Partner at Impact Venture Capital. “We’re ready for a world where workplace learning is hyper-engaging, personalized to the learner, and always drives bottom-line results. We’re excited to continue working with Upduo and see what their peer-to-peer learning platform can do in the hands of sales leaders as global corporations work to build internal knowledge centers.”
With the new funding, Upduo plans to address the training needs of even more industries and use ML to deliver intelligent personalized learning for teams. Upduo will expand its gamification features to improve employee retention by making workers feel valued on the job. Daniela Cruz, previously experienced Google executive, joins as a co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer to guide its new AI initiatives.
“Upduo helps us train retail employees on a national basis in just a few days, allowing us to teach product differentiators and measure employee comprehension along the way. The gamification features make it fun for them to do their training, and with the implementation of Upduo, we’ve achieved an increase in new sales of Motorola devices vs in areas where we haven’t used Upduo,” Howie Adams, Head of Regional Sales at Motorola.
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