GuideSpark Raises $15M To Become Your One-Stop HR Training Resource

Menlo Park-based startup GuideSpark has raised a new $15 million Series B from NEA, as well as existing investors Storm Ventures and IDG Ventures. GuideSpark previously raised $5 million in a Series A round, and offers companies SaaS applications and eLearning content aimed at streamlining an organization’s HR processes, and bringing them out of paper resources and online.

“We’re focused on helping corporations change how they communicate and engage their employees,” GuideSpark CEO Keith Kitani explained in an interview. “The way companies currently communicate information around benefits, performance management, compensation, etc. is through paper and seminars and text, and if you think about how people get information out in the consumer world, it’s through multimedia and mobile and we want to get companies to change  to that too.”

GuideSpark’s platform offers up a combination of video and mobile software that it says is more engaging to employees than binders of documents or even PDF resources stored on a server in endless file folders. But the advantages aren’t only on the user experience side for employees. The platform also helps employers quantify and analyze employee progress through training, and understanding of their benefits and other corporate information, by giving them reporting tools and metrics around time spent with materials and progress through the training library.

“What we’ve done is brought together in our company technology, in both tools and platforms, along with content experts,” Kitani said, describing GuideSpark’s other significant advantage to its enterprise customers. “So what we’ve been able to do is to really drive down the cost of customized content.” Providing content specific to customers, as well as the platform for improved delivery via mobile and online video makes for a package clients find hard to deny, Kitani said.

GuideSpark currently has over 250 customers, Kitani said, including some heavyweights like News Corp., L’Oreal, 7-Eleven and more, so the funding raised is designed to help it hire to accommodate the current pace of growth. They’re also always on the lookout for strategic acquisitions, he says, and are working on several things in the product pipeline, too.