Spekit’s ‘reinvention of Salesforce training’ raises $2.54m seed funding

3 Oct 2019

Spekit's founders sit together in front of a grey backdrop. The woman on the left has long, brown hair and is wearing a white blazer with long slits up the sleeves, which expose her arms. She is sitting with her hands crossed on her thigh. Under the white blazer, she's wearing a black T-shirt and red trousers. The woman sitting on the right also has her hands crossed on her thighs. She is wearing black trousers and a white blouse. She has long dark hair, and a tanned skin.

From left: Melanie Fellay, co-founder and CEO of Spekit, and Zari Zahra, co-founder and CPO. Image: Spekit

The Spekit training platform has already secured partners across real estate, financial services, tech, healthcare.

On Tuesday (1 October), Denver start-up Spekit announced that it has closed a $2.54m seed round led by Bonfire Ventures, with participation from Matchstick Ventures and individual investors including Dan Scheinman, an early investor in Zoom.

Launched in 2018 at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference by co-founders Melanie Fellay and Zari Zahra, Spekit’s training platform aims to address the growing challenges associated with the adoption of new technology, decentralised training and issues surrounding outdated documentation.

With the fresh funding, it plans to “reinvent Salesforce training”, among other systems.

The company originally launched in San Francisco, but the team decided to migrate to Denver, which has a growing tech scene and talent pool. Earlier this week, we reported on Denver-based blockchain healthcare company BurstIQ, which raised $5.5m in Series A funding.

‘Change is constant’

Zahra and Fellay had noticed that existing training solutions, by nature of being disconnected from SaaS applications and outside users’ workflows, decreased productivity while being difficult to maintain in constantly changing work environments.

Fellay, who is CEO of Spekit, said: “In today’s SaaS-led workplace, change is constant. To train employees as change occurs, companies had two options: a static learning management system (LMS) that required digging through a separate tool for answers, or a painful-to-manage digital walkthrough solution that breaks with any update.

“Having experienced the above challenges as co-workers, 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.”

This led Fellay and Zahra to develop a technology that integrates with applications such as Salesforce, enabling companies to easily create training and documentation around existing processes and terminology.

Spekit provides pre-built templates to simplify content creation, generating baseline training specific to each tool. The platform provides a suite of extensions, so it can also be integrated with Google Chrome to ensure that training is accessible from anywhere.

Existing partners

Spekit has already secured partners across real estate, financial services, tech and healthcare. Spekit helps these partners with onboarding and change management challenges.

Brett Queener, partner at Bonfire Ventures, said: “As we saw over the last two decades, software is eating the world. The average organisation deploys more than 30 SaaS solutions, but are employees happily 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.”

Queener added that Spekit’s approach to tracking changes and creating training, paired with its “easy-to-deploy and easy-to-consume learning solution” can help companies improve 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.”