If you’ve ever had to sit through corporate training videos while you feel your will to live slowly ebb out of every pore of your body, a new startup has some good news for you. Describing itself as “the TikTok of workplace learning,” 5Mins recently raised a round of funding in a bid to introduce a bit of workplace learning in an attention-deficit world. The company adds gamification, social features, and “intelligent personalization.”
The platform claims to already have a sizable database of 15,000+ bite-sized lessons, saying it covers more than a hundred topics of content spanning a range of technical and soft skills.
The company raised a $5.7 million round at a $16 million pre-money valuation. The round was led by AlbionVC with Chalfen Ventures, Edenred Capital, Portfolio Ventures and Blue Lion Global. It says that, since going to market in March 2022, it has racked up more than a 100,000 lesson views and that its recurring revenue has grown 20x.
5Mins was founded by Saurav Chopra — previously co-founder and CEO at leading employee engagement platform Perkbox.
“Our mission is to help companies build a learning culture so their people can unlock their true potential and we have come a long way in a short period of time,” said co-founder and CEO Chopra in an interview with TechCrunch. “We are building the first global learning superapp that companies of all sizes can use to upskill everyone, improve employee retention and drive innovation.”
The company is aiming to level the playing field for employee learning and development, giving SMBs and mid-market companies the best possible toolkit to unlock their teams’ potential. The goal is to even out the talent development pipeline.
“While SMBs and Mid-Market companies will never have the Talent Development budgets big corporates have, with 5Mins we provide them with the most effective L&D tools to keep their employees engaged and to retain them for longer,” says Chopra. “What was clear to me while scaling Perkbox and serving thousands of employers was that the no. 1 reason why employees leave a company is lack of growth and development and it was also one of the top criteria for picking a place of work, especially for Gen Z and Millennial employees. Without the right development tools at their disposal, SMBs and mid-market companies risk being left behind in the battle for talent.”
For the next 18 to 24 months, the company is focusing on building its team, taking the company to more countries and verticals, and building a more robust set of metrics to see the efficacy of the platform on business outcomes.
“We would love for 5Mins to become the daily learning companion for employees worldwide who feel motivated and empowered by the growth and development they see in themselves, because they use the platform. If we accomplish that, we believe we will have helped transform hundreds of thousands of companies and therefore society,” Chopra lays out his long-term vision for the company. “Given growth and development is one of the top reasons employees join or leave a company, we want employees to be able to pick companies not just on the basis of their Glassdoor scores but based on the growth they can expect to experience.”
I was curious what the founder had learned from using his own product.
“Like any time-crunched founder with a million things to do, making time for learning (prior to 5Mins) meant spending hours on evenings and weekends researching and learning from the best content relevant to our business, our teams and I. I would then curate and share this content with the team who may not have the time to watch it in entirety,” Chopra says. “With very high-quality content from leaders and coaches on leadership, growth, culture development and org design available in bite-sized format that can be shared instantly with our team, 5Mins has become an integral part of the learning journey for the entire business, helping us to grow as we grow the business.”