Australia workforce training start-up Go1 gets $40m

Salesforce Ventures came in as a new investor, while existing backers Microsoft and Our Innovation Fund re-upped. Microsoft is participating via its M12 venture fund, which led the company’s $21 million Series B last year with support from Larsen Ventures and Y Combinator.

Go1, which operates a platform featuring a range of online employee training and talent management products, claims to have grown fivefold during the past year in the US, bringing its global customer base to more than 3,000 organizations and 1.5 million individual users. The new capital will focus on an ongoing North American expansion program.

The investment coincides with a partnership with Microsoft’s remote workforce communication tool Teams, which will allow the service’s 75 million users to access the Go1 platform. This comes at a time of structural shift in online professional services caused by COVID-19, with Go1 claiming that a spike in remote learning demand has tripled the rate of engagement on its platform during April.

“We met GO1 many months before COVID-19 was on the tip of everyone’s tongue and were impressed then with the growth of the platform and the ability of the team to expand their corporate training offering significantly in North America and Europe,” Soma Somasegar, a managing director at Madrona, said in a statement. “The global pandemic has only increased the need to both provide training and retraining – and also to do it remotely. GO1 is an important link in the chain of recovery.” 

Go1 stands out in Australia’s competitive workforce management space due to its niche strategy, which entails little incumbent competition in foreign markets. The company has raised $80 million to date, with other backers including Blue Sky Ventures, Tank Stream Ventures, Black Sheep Capital, Amasia, Full Circle Ventures, Oxford University, and the Queensland government’s Business Development Fund. Australian Shark Tank investor Steve Baxter is also an investor.

Late-stage venture funding in Australia has experienced momentum in recent years as homegrown technology companies begin to play higher profile roles in a local business culture traditionally dominated by primary industries. The trend has been characterized by a preference for enterprise software, which is seen as more amenable to global scaling through “bottom-up” marketing techniques such as search engine optimization, word-of-mouth, and viral features built into digital products.

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• Topics
• Australasia
• Support services
• Expansion
• Australia
• Microsoft
• M12
• Education
• TMT
• professional services