People Intelligence startup Nestor raises $2M to help companies nurture their talents
Nestor, a startup that aims to transform the way organizations develop and retain talent by creating a common language for skills at work, has raised a $2 million seed round for further expansion. The round is led by the Bulgarian VC Eleven Ventures, joined by Underline Ventures, and prominent angel investors from the San Francisco Bay Area. Lead investor, Eleven Ventures has been an early backer and key part of scaling into the global markets of companies such as Payhawk and Gtmhub in verticals like fintech and the future of work.
Have you ever felt underappreciated in the company you work for? Or do you sometimes think your employees do not deliver enough? Well, seems like this is a challenge many teams across the globe face.
Over the past years, the transition to hybrid work environments along with digitization skill sharing and education, have forced organizations to rethink their workforce development strategies. The rigid structure of jobs inside the organizations and pushing training for employees from the top down, assuming the organization knows best what skills people need, clearly do not work in this new dynamic. Furthermore, this has a negative impact on employees, leaving the individual with the feeling that they have no say over the work that they do.
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Tomorrow’s workforce development is agile, business-focused, and democratized to give people far more ownership, opportunity, and equity. And skill-focused work culture is indeed what Nestor stands for. Nestor’s People Intelligence Platform brings together employee engagement, performance management, and development planning. The team uses a skills-based approach, predictive analytics, and nudging automation to help organizations develop and retain talent.
The solution links skills to the most important talent operations by creating a unified skills-based profile to enable employees to forge new career paths or lateral moves based on both their interests and the organizational needs. With Nestor, each employee is empowered to take ownership of their own development, access new growth opportunities, get involved in cross-functional initiatives, and learn new future-fit skills that will help them (and the company) succeed.
“Every employee is unique. We envision a world where every employee receives the right opportunity at the right time to continually learn and improve the skills that will help them succeed. We help organizations make an impact on each employee’s development and enable HR people leaders to build agile people strategies that move beyond the traditional job approach by placing skills at the front and center of their talent operations,” says Bogdan Apostol, CEO & Co-founder of Nestor.
Founded in 2018 in Romania, Nestor is now trusted by HR and people leaders in the most forward-thinking mid-to-large enterprises, including Fortune 500 companies, across Europe, North America, and Latin America. Nestor’s platform achieves a 98% adoption rate in organizations, as employees see a clear output in their individual career growth, develop new skills, discover opportunities, take new roles, and are retained for longer. Recently, Andreea Baciu, the Chief Culture Officer of UiPath (Romania´s unicorn!), became an advisor.
The new capital from the latest funding round will enable Nestor to grow its sales and customer success teams and accelerate its expansion on the newly entered US and Latin America markets with a focus on mid-to-large enterprises. The company will further invest in its product innovation and plans to launch its smart career pathing module so that employees can easily explore what are the alternative paths they can take in their careers and what skills they should focus on acquiring in the next period.
“Bogdan and his team are reimagining the multi-billion dollar people analytics and talent software market by offering workforce visibility over non-linear assets such as employee skills & capabilities, engagement, performance, culture, and career mobility in an effortless and codified way. We are thrilled to join Nestor’s journey to deliver an end-to-end people intelligence platform to support organizations worldwide,” highlighted Vassil Terziev, Managing Partner of Eleven Ventures.
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