YC grad Workramp lands $1.8 million seed round

Workramp, a startup that wants to change the way companies onboard and train their employees, announced a $1.8 million seed round today.

Investors include Susa Ventures, Initialized Capital, Haystack, Liquid 2, Wei Fund, Elad Gil, Adrian Aoun, Charlie Songhurst, and Y Combinator. The company is a graduate of the Y Combinator Summer 2016 class and previously raised $120,000.

Workramp co-founder Ted Blosser, who spent almost five years at Box, says his company wants to transform traditional learning management systems (LMSs) in the enterprise, not unlike how Box changed content management.

“Training and development has been around forever, but LMSs are boring, stodgy, super expensive and no one likes to use them,” Blosser said. Workramp’s goal has been to build something that’s much more engaging for users and easier for managers to access valuable data on the back end.

The idea for starters is to streamline the onboarding process for new employees, giving them a clear digital path for getting started with the company. Creating a process to bring new employees into the fold is a huge challenge for companies of all sizes, but especially for fast-growing startups.

Workramp provides a platform for organizing all of the tasks new employees need to complete to get comfortable working with the company and doing their specific jobs. It can include not only nuts and bolts training on the systems in place, but also building a concrete set of goals to get the employee up to speed in an organized fashion.

For instance, a new salesperson may have to learn to use Salesforce.com, write a sample contact email, create a video of a sales presentation and set up 30-, 60- and 90-day goals by the end of the first week with the company. Workramp can move the new employees through this process and give them a systematic way of getting going, an approach that seems obvious enough, but is often lacking, especially in newer organizations.

“We are transforming a disjointed process into a formalized and consistent process, which gives management visibility into how new [employees are] doing,” Blosser explained.

Managers get that visibility through a dashboard, which provides a comprehensive view of each employee’s progress on completing their onboarding tasks. While Blosser acknowledges that many SaaS companies are providing usage data to managers, he wants Workramp to be the training center across all of them. “Every team has systems of record and systems of engagement. We want to give horizontal training data across [all of that],” Blosser said.

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Photo: Workramp

Over time, the company hopes to be part of the on-going development and goal tracking of employees, giving managers insight into employees’ progress throughout the year, not just when they are starting or when it’s employee performance review time.

For now, the $1.8 million allows Workramp, which launched in 2015 and currently has 7 employees, to bring in more sales and engineering talent as it ramps up and looks to grow beyond the 50 customers it currently has.