Seed Of The Week: Simbel

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What: Simbel has built a SaaS-enabled educational marketplace for employers to provide training and skills development for employees. The goal is to allow employees to engage in continuous learning to advance their careers while ensuring they have the right skill sets as the business needs evolve. The platform generates performance reviews to benchmark an employee's knowledge, highlight training needs, and measure progress. The platform can be customized to mix internal training material with a broader marketplace of 500 training courses from external experts. Simbel works with HR teams, primarily SMBs in Europe, to deploy the platform and adapt it to the company's specific needs.

Why: Career development may be increasingly essential, but in-house programs often get little engagement from employees who tend to see them as an obligation rather than an opportunity. HR departments at SMBs, in particular, are often stretched thin when it comes to having the resources to develop and manage employee training programs. By creating a marketplace of inspiring experts that is easy to deploy, Simbel believes it can make training more efficient and effective.

Seed: €4 million

Who: Co-founders are CEO Loïc Jourdain (formerly head of business operations at French services marketplace Stootie) and Charles Gras (formerly global product marketing director at 360Learning).

Investors: Speedinvest and Brighteye led the round, which also included participation from business angels such as eFounders co-founder Thibaud Elziere, Figures co-founder Virgile Raingeard, Stupeflix co-founder Nicolas Steegmann, and Prestashop co-founder Alexandre Eruimy.

What's Next: Since launching in 2021, the company has co-developed its beta with partners Blablacar and Roland Berger. With the funding announcement this week, the company has now officially launched the first public version of the service for SMBs in Europe. Simbel plans to use the Seed funding to accelerate product development. The company is hiring.