Female Founders, Investors Propel Spekit’s Disruptive Technology

Female founders and investors are propelling the growth of Denver-based digital adoption and enablement platform Spekit. The company announced today the close of a $12.2 million Series A investment round. The investment, led by Foundry Group and Renegade Partners, with participation from Operator Collective, Matchstick Ventures and Bonfire Ventures, brings the company’s total fundraising to $15.7 million.

Spekit’s Zari Zahra

Spekit’s Melanie Fellay

CEO Melanie Fellay and Zari Zahra, head of product and technology founded Spekit in 2018. It is one of only three women-led companies in the broader digital adoption, enablement and Learning Management System (LMS) space.

As part of the financing, Spekit welcomes two female investors to its board. Jaclyn Freeman Hester is a Foundry Group Partner and serial SaaS investor. Roseanne Wince is co-founder and managing partner of Renegade Partners. Renegade’s previous investments include unicorns Looker, Glossier, KeepTruckin and more.

With this latest funding round, Spekit will further advance the product. They plan to develop smarter, more personalized learning experiences and scale its go-to-market operations.

Training Techniques Must Evolve with the Workplace

Spekit tackles two of the biggest barriers to growth in today’s SaaS-driven, remote work environment: driving the adoption of constantly evolving technology and providing increasingly dispersed employees with the knowledge they need to be productive and successful in their roles.

By combining the power of a digital adoption platform, an LMS and an enablement solution, Spekit solves these challenges by embedding real-time, contextual training, processes and guidance directly within the applications that employees use every day. Spekit puts access to answers at employees’ fingertips. This enables its customers to drastically reduce the time it takes to onboard, roll out changes and scale their teams.

“Between the quantum leap of SaaS adoption, accelerated rate of change and shift to remote work, the world looks drastically different today than it did a decade ago,” said Fellay. “Yet, when I looked at the way employees were being trained and enabled in their roles, there’d been little to no progress over that same timeline”

“We’re using more digital tools and increasingly complex workflows, but the expectation remains that an employee will figure it all out with a PowerPoint presentation or LMS course. The solution became so clear. Of course, learning should be integrated into an employee’s flow of work. Obviously, training and resources should be contextualized, personalized and instantly accessible. We need to make it as easy to learn in our professional lives as it is in our personal lives.”

A History of Outstanding Growth

In 2020 alone, Spekit saw 400% growth in year-over-year revenue. High-growth companies including Uber Freight, Outreach.io, Southwest Airlines, Databricks and more joined the platform.

Harish Mohan is senior vice president of revenue excellence and operations at Outreach.io. “At Outreach, our mission is to help sales reps build pipeline and close that pipeline faster and more efficiently,” she said. “Spekit aligns with this mission by allowing our reps to be self-sufficient in mastering their tools, sales processes and the continuous changes to our business in a contextual and intuitive way. This maximizes the time they’re able to spend prospecting and selling, helping to drive the growth of our reps and ultimately, the growth of our business.”

Foundry Partners Group’s Jacklyn Freeman Hester

This year, Spekit added five times more users and more than doubled its employee head count. That made it one of the fastest-growing platforms in its category.

“We look for founders like Melanie and Zari, who are obsessed with solving challenging but significant problems in innovative ways,” said Foundry Group’s Hester. “Spekit’s disruptive technology addresses a clear gap in the market by providing a comprehensive solution designed to mirror how individuals actually learn, absorb and retain knowledge. We’re thrilled to partner with the Spekit team as they reshape employee learning and empower workers to reach their potential.”