Behind the Investment: How Skilljar is Changing How Companies Interact with their Customers

Companies are more focused than ever on ensuring their customers are successful after their initial purchase, and we at Insight have had a front-row seat to the rise of this broad category of customer enablement. We've invested in companies like Gainsight (focused on managing customer success) and WalkMe (focused on driving product adoption through in-app guidance), and we're always keeping a close eye on new trends in this category.

Customer education, or the practice of digitally delivering product training to your customers, is one such area we've seen gain a lot traction over the past couple of years. Most corporate learning solutions out in the market have been built for internal use cases, often focused on HR/compliance training for an organization's employees. Customer education solutions are externally focused, allowing companies to deliver training content to their customers in order to more successfully onboard, engage, and retain them. Ongoing customer education is emerging as an important piece of the post-sale customer journey, and COVID-19 has only caused this trend to accelerate, as companies look for a safe, scalable alternative to in-person training. Skilljar is a customer education platform that has been purpose-built for this use case, and we're excited to lead their $33M Series B.

We've been big fans of Skilljar ever since we first met with Sandi Lin, Skilljar's CEO/co-founder, back in 2017, when the business had a few dozen customers and was mostly selling to other software companies. We stayed in contact with Sandi over the next couple of years and were continually impressed with the progress she and the team were making, rapidly growing and diversifying their customer base which now includes customers in many non-tech industries like financial services, manufacturing, and construction. The current customer list includes companies like U-Haul, LinkedIn, Verizon, Tableau, and Spotify as well as many Insight portfolio companies!

We spoke with a number of Skilljar customers and consistently heard that Skilljar was driving substantial ROI in a number of ways: reduced customer support costs, marked increases in customer retention, reduced T&E expenses as companies transitioned away from in-person training, and some customers had even started monetizing the training they were delivering through the platform. When Sandi decided to raise a round of capital as demand started to accelerate earlier this year, we were excited to finally have the opportunity to partner up with her and the Skilljar team. 

We're looking forward to working closely with Sandi and the team to help Skilljar make the transition from startup to ScaleUp and own the emerging category of customer education!