Junto, a Berlin-based B2B upskilling platform, has raised €5 million in a seed funding round to grow its team and develop its technology.
The funding round, which follows a €1.2 million round raised earlier this year, was led by Earlybird and participated by Picus Capital, Emerge Capital, and over 10 angels.
Founded by Marius Hepp and Johannes Schnell-Kretschmer, Junto is a B2B upskilling platform that lets employees take live classes from tech operators at companies like Google and Amazon. It sells its learning platform directly to businesses to provide to their employees.
Unlike other online learning platforms like Udemy, where learning is self-directed, Junto learners study in cohorts. The company believes this will encourage more people to complete the courses. Junto claims its course completion rate is 95% as opposed to 13% for massive open online courses (MOOCs). Junto’s cohorts consist of about 50 people now, but the company aims to increase it to 200 to 300.
Participants go through an eight-week onboarding process, during which they participate in one 90 to120-minute live class a week, all in English. After this initial period, they get access to live classes, on-demand content, and community events like lunch and learn.
Speaking about the platform, Co-founder Marius Hepp said,
“It’s a highly-curated social network. Say you’re a salesperson in Berlin and you enter Junto, you immediately can find others in the same realm. We’ll even help you match with those people and exchange best practices.”
Junto’s courses broadly fall into two categories: classes around leadership and then more functional courses about specific roles such as sales or HR. Hepp said 95% of the courses are taught by top operators at companies like Google and Amazon, and 5% by superstars, like successful founders.
With the latest funding, Hepp said the company wants to grow its team to about 20 employees by the end of this year and 50 by the end of 2023. He also said that the company will develop the platform’s tech and prepare for internationalisation.
Junto has already brought on almost 100 corporate clients on its platform, including successful scale-ups such as Everphone, Sendinblue, and Hive.
