Businesses today are facing a shortage of skilled workers. The pandemic has also forced employers to rethink how they train employees.
These trends are helping fuel the growth of RapL,a startup that just raised $2.2 million for its mobile-focused microlearning workforce training platform.
Toyota, Casio, Shell and several others are using RapL to improve the skills of their workforce. The company offers adaptive, personalized, bite-sized, AI-powered learning modules in mobile apps that are tailored to each customer and their goals. RapL uses gamification and a rewards program to incentivize engagement. Both office staff and front-line workers can be trained with RapL’s technology.
Use cases include training employees on company safety procedures or educating sales staff on customer engagement.
There is a flurry of companies offering similar workforce training platforms, from traditional learning management systems (LMSs) to other microlearning tools such as MindTickle and Axonify.
The Seattle company is led by co-founder CEO Arun Muthukumar and CPO Murali Krishnan,lifelong friends who met in college in India. Krishnan previously spent 21 years at Microsoft and was vice president of software engineering at Starbucks from 2018 to 2020. Muthukumar worked at Bell Labs and Cisco before helping launch Linkstreet Learning in 2011; RapL was formed earlier this year and now owns Linkstreet. Krishnan is based in Seattle and Muthukumar is in India, where most of the company’s 26-person workforce is based.
Seattle-based Founders’ Co-op led the funding round. Other backers include former Microsoft leaders Ben Slivka and Lisa Slivka; Vetri Vellore, founder of Ally.io; and Praveen Seshadri, former CEO of AppSheet.
