360Learning – the global collaborative learning SaaS leader – announced a $200 million growth investment led by Sumeru (Sumeru Equity Partners), SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Silver Lake Waterman with participation from existing investors Bpifrance Large Venture, XAnge and Educapital.
360Learning has aggressively invested in collaborative learning innovation and is seeking to revolutionize how companies approach learning and development, making it bottom-up, instead of top-down and embedding it in company culture. 360Learning empowers corporations to shift their workforce to growth mindsets and enables their employees to develop skills necessary to meet today’s challenges.
Instead of unsuccessful reskilling plans, decade-long career paths and ever-outdated skill matrixes that take years and millions of dollars to implement, the 360Learning platform empowers learners to build their own skills, create courses in as few as 17 minutes and share knowledge throughout the business. Customers have created over 3 million courses on the platform, with the most popular topics including employee onboarding, software training, sales enablement, leadership training and soft skills. As learners go through each course, they can add comments, answer questions and send one-click reactions to the course creator – driving high engagement and retention, with an average course completion rate of 91% on the platform.
The power of collaborative learning is real: courses on 360Learning receive an average 95% Relevance Score and offer learning experiences that are exciting, evolving and always updated with the latest information. Learners using 360Learning can share real-time feedback and report when a course is outdated or inaccurate. This makes corporate education more efficient by relieving the burden of L&D teams from having to monitor and update thousands of courses, as well as minimizing the risk that training modules will include incorrect information, such as out-of-date health and safety procedures for frontline workers.
360Learning also leverages AI to analyze significant data sets created from collaborative learning interactions and applies these insights to help learning communities identify what courses are missing or need to be improved, speed up course delivery, ensure learners find courses tailored to their immediate needs and keep growing through constant learning.
Over 1,500 customers including LVMH, Aircall, Toyota and Appen use the 360Learning platform globally to help reshape their company cultures, increase new hire time-to-productivity, free up billable days and ultimately increase sales.
The new funding brings the total raised by 360Learning to over $240 million. The company will use the funding to grow the team to over 500 people by the end of next year driven by hires in innovation, engineering and product; expand internationally across North America, Asia, Europe and South America; and invest in strategic M&A as 360Learning continues its mission to be the number one corporate learning platform in the world.
Nick Hernandez, founder, and CEO at 360Learning, said: “By focusing on collaborative learning and combining it with AI and data, we’re radically changing how people learn in the workplace. Our engagement figures show that with the right learning approach and technology, L&D becomes a driver of growth. Learners take control of their own learning and their companies thrive and lead in the new hybrid work environment. We’re delighted to welcome a brilliant new set of investors from three different continents to help us spearhead a transformative breakthrough in the learning market.”
Sebastien Botin, Director of HR at Socotec, global leader in construction, infrastructure and industry with 9,000+ employees across 23 countries, said: “360Learning allowed us to improve time-to-productivity of new employees by 30%. My team freed up 800 billable days. This represents a potential incremental turnover of 500,000€. Collaborative features were key to achieve such an improvement in our onboarding process. Experts are connected to field employees directly through the platform. That is a huge advantage when you are scaling training.”
Sanjeet Mitra and George Kadifa, Sumeru Co-Founders & Managing Directors, said: “We believe that employee learning and development will be the single most important factor for enterprises in the next 25 years—enabling growth, building durable company cultures, accelerating innovation, and enhancing communities broadly. We are sincerely thrilled to partner with Nick, the management team and a terrific investor group as 360Learning illuminates the limitless possibilities of collaborative learning in this next era of corporate education.”
Paul Davison, senior investor for SoftBank Investment Advisers, said: “We believe the accelerating evolution of the workforce towards remote and distributed teams places an imperative on all companies to rethink how they train, upskill and retain employees more effectively. 360Learning places collaboration at the heart of the learning experience with personalised courses, decentralised creation and adaptive delivery. The platform draws out the best knowledge and experience from every corner of an enterprise, which boosts employee use and transforms engagement levels. We are immensely excited to support Nick and the 360Learning team to continue to invest in the product and scale their customer base globally.”
